Waste of the Day: Throwback Thursday: Vermont Counts Its Chickens
Topline: There are plenty of proven methods for conducting demographic surveys. Questionnaires and systematic census interviews work just fine.
Asking Americans to run around Vermont and count the number of barns in the state seems a bit less effective, but that’s what the National Park Service decided to spend $150,000 on in 2008. The money would be worth nearly $219,000 today.
That’s according to the “Wastebook” reporting published by the late U.S. Senator Dr. Tom Coburn. For years, these reports shined a white-hot spotlight on federal frauds and taxpayer abuses.
Coburn, the legendary U.S. Senator from Oklahoma, earned the nickname "Dr. No" by stopping thousands of pork-barrel projects using the Senate rules. Projects that he couldn't stop, Coburn included in his oversight reports.
Coburn's Wastebook 2008 included 65 examples of outrageous spending worth more than $1.3 billion, including the $150,000 for Vermont’s barn census.
Key facts: The Vermont Division for Historic Preservation launched the “barn census” in the hopes of collecting pictures of and stories about every barn in the state.
Challenges quickly arose, as reported by the Bennington Banner, even though the state provided “workshops on barn census taking” for volunteers.
Some barn owners didn’t allow census takers onto their property or simply weren’t home. Others spoke endlessly about their barn’s history, taking up hours of volunteers’ time.
Census takers also said there were few reliable methods for determining a barn’s age “aside from it simply looking old.”
The photo records are even more amusing. One graduate student at the University of Vermont participated in the census as part of her coursework and needed the help of 12 classmates to snap a photo titled “That’s A Barn!” The picture is, in fact, of a barn.
The census continued sporadically for 11 years until 2019, at which point it had documented only 2,800 of the estimated 10,000 historical barns in Vermont.
Summary: At least counting chickens before they’re hatched is free. Why should it cost $150,000 to count barns?
The #WasteOfTheDay is brought to you by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com
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