The Terminators
Who would have thought that $10 million would be so hard to spend? Yet despite the Department of Agriculture’s long to-do list and its crying need to bolster its inspection staff, it has encumbered just 10 percent of that amount six months into the fiscal year.
What’s more, the 10 percent that has been encumbered – in a contract to Terminix – raised serious questions among legislators as to the equity and effectiveness of that expenditure. Why, the senators and representatives at the hearing asked, should a private firm be given the ability to decide how public funds are spent?
The inability of Sharon Hurd, DOA director, to answer questions forthrightly and intelligibly brings to the fore concerns of longstanding that the DOA, beholden as it has been for years to the plant industry, may not be the right agency in which the state’s biosecurity efforts and funds are vested.
