We already knew that the Scott administration’s pathetically inadequate family shelters were a Potemkin village meant to project the image of concern without making any effort to address the scope of the homelessness crisis.

And now we know, thanks to VTDigger, that this sham effort is also a colossal waste of resources.

The shelters, which can house up to 17 families for up to five months, will cost at least $3 million. The bulk of that money, some $2.6 million, will go to an out-of-state contractor that will provide staffing for the shelters because, well, local service agencies are already stretched to the max.

You may recall that the motel voucher program, deemed too costly to continue intact by Gov. Phil Scott and the Democratic caucuses in the Legislature, had a maximum cost of $80 per motel room per night. If you divide $80 into $3 million, you’ll see that the money spent on these family shelters — really, spent almost entirely on well-compensated staffers from a for-profit company — could have paid for 37,500 nights of motel shelter.

Can you say “boondoggle,” friends? I know you can.

The contractor, North Carolina-based IEM International, Inc., is charging the state $107.50 per hour for basic “shelter team workers” and as much as $325 an hour for “program managers.”

Which is way, way, waaaaaaaay more than local service workers are paid. Central Vermont’s Good Samaritan Haven pays its shelter workers $20-26 an hour, according to VTDigger, while a Burlington-based agency pays $24-33.

Chris Winters, commissioner of the Department of Children and Families and, often, the administration’s designated explainer of the inexplicable, attributes the high costs to the fact that the shelters were (a) rushed into operation and (b) meant to be temporary. “You’re going to have to pay a premium for that,” he said.

Yeah, and whose fault is that? The administration has failed for years to devise a gludepath from the motel program. And the consequences of new limits on the program, enacted this year, were clear months ago. And yet the administration didn’t even approve these woefully inadequate family shelters until last month.

And they still refuse to take any other steps to help the roughly 1,500 Vermonters, all of them classed as vulnerable, who’ve been unsheltered since mid-September.

It also seems likely that the final cost of the family shelters will be more than $3 million, perhaps substantially more. Winters told VTDigger that “we still truly don’t know the cost” because “things have moved so quickly.”

We’re paying a heavy price for Gov. Phil Scott’s token gesture toward the unsheltered. It just adds another dimension to the ongoing disgrace of his administration’s failure slash refusal to truly address the crisis.