Now comes Auditor Doug Hoffer with all kinds of cheery news about the Agency of Transportation’s road construction effort. His latest performance audit takes a look at VTrans’ work in cost and scheduling of paving projects, and he didn’t find much for former contractor and now Governor Phil Scott to be proud of.

In fact, Scott ought to be embarrassed.

(Full report downloadable here.)

Hoffer looked at 14 major paving projects and found… “significant deviations” in project scheduling, especially in the preliminary engineering phase; “a lack of consistent record-keeping” that made it difficult to determine why delays took place; a lack of performance metrics for scheduling; and while VTrans did fairly well with simpler projects,

… for the more complex projects, VTrans always exceeded the initial cost estimates provided to the Legislature by more than 50 percent and completed them up to six years late.

That sounds like abject failure to me.

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