Wichita has cut waste, officials say

Wichita city officials say they have worked hard to eliminate waste. Well, except for this.

It’s been an ongoing problem in downtown Wichita. Not only are bench lights apparently permanently switched on, we find the tall street lights also burning in the middle of the day.

This is especially problematic given these two Fridays — with street lights switched on near noon — were Riverfest Fridays. Many visitors, both natives and tourists, may have been downtown to see the waste on display. It doesn’t promote a good image for our city and its leaders.

The wasteful spending on illuminating street lights in the middle of the day is an indication of the attitude of the city as explained in Forget the vampires. Let’s tackle the real monsters. Through public service announcements on television and Facebook, Wichita city officials have urged citizens to do things like unplugging microwave ovens when not in use. This saves a very small — vanishingly small — amount of electricity at a huge cost of inconvenience.

So while the city advises you to unplug alarm clocks and cell phone chargers when not using them, note that the city cares nothing about running the street lights in the middle of the day.

The lights illustrated in these photographs are, undoubtedly, a small portion of the city’s spending. But you don’t have to look very hard to find waste like this, and we know that small examples of waste are multiplied many times. So when city leaders tell us that there is nowhere left to cut in the budget, that everything that can be done to trim the fat has already been done, and that the only thing we can do is raise taxes — well, think of this photograph and others illustrated in Wichita advances in the field of cost savings, Another Friday lunch, and even more lights are on, To compensate, Wichita switched on the street lights, In Wichita, the streetside seating is illuminated very well, In Wichita, the rooftops are well-lit and On a sunny day in downtown Wichita you can see the street lights.

This is not to say that waste like this does not occur in the private sector. Of course it does. But businesses and individuals have a powerful incentive to avoid waste that isn’t present in government: Businesses and people are spending their own money. And even if they waste money, it’s their money, not ours.