An Earmark to Rinse and Spit
The state of New Mexico is on the hunt, and the federal government has graciously offered to help them in their search. When first mentioned, the word ‘search’ conjures up one of two images for me: the kind of search that involves riffling through couch cushions to find my remote control, or the more serious type that involves helicopters, medics and missing hikers. In the 2009 omnibus appropriations act, the federal government is funding neither (no, not even those handy remote control location devices). Instead, the United States of America will be giving $95,000 to New Mexico so that they may find a dental school location.
By this, I don’t mean that a dental school will have its relocation costs subsidized. Rather, this money will go to some person in the New Mexico bureaucracy, who will likely just sit down with a road map provided by the state’s tourism department and pick a spot where a dental school would be nice to have.
Finding a location for a dental school should not require that kind of money. Look, I’ll do it for free. Albuquerque, not too big to begin with, is over six times larger than any other town in the state, so we can rule out Las Cruces, Rio Rancho and Santa Fe right away. Since this is so, I reckon that Albuquerque, with a population of about half a million, is the only city that could support a professional dental school.
With that in mind, we can search for commercial real estate on loopnet.com (New Mexico’s number one commercial real estate listing service!). As you can see in the pictures below, there are some fine potential locations for the dental school. There is a former holistic health center available – that looks promising. Ahh, a former church equipped with 15-20 classrooms! That works! Boom. Done. Recall that the earmark is only for finding a location, nothing more. No moving, no leasing, no construction.
To get an idea of how much is being spent on a task that can realistically be completed with a few phone calls and a trip to google.com, we can compare this earmark with the amount of money that would be needed in a real search. According to the San Gorgonio Search and Rescue website, it costs about $3,000 dollars to operate a standard H-3 search and rescue helicopter for one hour. This means that the $95,000 used for information that is available in a Wikipedia article could have been used to conduct over 31 hours of search and rescue operations for people in actual, pressing danger.
I know I said I’d do it for free, but to be honest, I could really use $95,000. If any New Mexico bureaucrats are reading this, please feel free to send a cheque for the above amount to Tim Mak, c/o FrumForum.com. If you’re not willing to do this, then I’d have to say that this is one earmark I’d like to see lost but not found.