ALBANY — Welcome to the opulent state Education Department — where fully outfitted workspaces sit unused, and there’s so much furniture on hand that the agency gives away perfectly good “surplus” to employees.
As The Post revealed yesterday, the clueless department officials unwittingly sabotaged a huge federal grant application with a request for a whopping $200,000 in top-of-the-line office furniture.
Yesterday, the embarrassed education brass admitted that including the lavish furniture request in their application for money from the Obama administration was a big mistake. They promised that it wouldn’t be done in the next round of bidding, and vowed to undertake a top-to-bottom review of the agency’s purchasing.
BIGS ADMIT PLAN TO SPEND GRANT MONEY ON FURNITURE WAS A ‘MISTAKE’
The 2,000 employees stationed in the Beaux Arts education palace across the street from the Capitol boast such excess that, once a year, they’re even allowed to take home “surplus” desks and file cabinets.
Employees questioned the department’s longstanding practice of opening its warehouse of surplus furniture each year for the public to peruse and take home.
Of course, agency employees get first dibs.
“If it’s good enough to bring home, it’s good enough to use at work,” said one woman who worked in the finance department.
The extravagance here runs so deep that spendthrift managers sometimes replace office workers’ chairs to match the building’s color-coded décor, insiders say.
“My chair broke, so they gave me a purple chair,” one agency employee told The Post yesterday.
“I had it for maybe a month. Then they came and took it away. There was nothing wrong with it. We had to order a green chair because the purple chair didn’t go on our floor.”
Outraged education workers scoffed when asked about the over-the-top office wish list that helped dash the state’s hope for up to $700 million from the feds’ Race to the Top program.
They saw little need for the 24 “executive chairs,” which agency heads had deemed vital, at $550 each.
“The money should have gone to the kids — not so some guy can sit his fat ass on an ergonomically correct, $550 chair,” another Education Department worker said.
“When I walk around the building and I make my rounds, I don’t see anybody sitting in a chair that’s not up to specs. It seems like nonsense.”
The Education Department spent at least $660,000 on office furniture in 2009, including $11,000 to pay for an estimated 23 chairs, according to a Post review of records from the state Comptroller’s Office.
Education Commissioner David Steiner ordered a “top-to-bottom review” of the agency’s purchasing policies yesterday on the heels of The Post’s reporting.
Department spokesman Thomas Dunn insisted no extra money was spent on chairs or other furnishings that match the agency’s interior.
He said any color-coding was done during the course of a recently completed $35 million renovation.
“We don’t have color coding,” Dunn said. “We have a gorgeous building. We have taken very good care of it.”
The 430,000-square-foot State Education Building that houses a vast majority of the state’s educational infrastructure has been considered an architectural treasure since its completion in 1912.
The 36 imposing Corinthian pillars that line its façade along Albany’s Washington Avenue make up the longest colonnade in the United States.
Inside, bureaucrats hustle under the splendor of 32 education-themed murals by painter Will H. Low.
Since 1982, the building has undergone a magnificent renovation at a cost of at least $35 million.
Union officials, meanwhile, said the flubbed grant pitch demonstrates a larger lack of judgment by the state leadership.
“You can’t but have your blood boil when you see this kind of thing,” Civil Service Employees Association spokesman Stephen Madarasz said. “We have serious issues we need to be tackling. We need serious people to address them who aren’t worried about what chair they’re going to be sitting in.”