Maine’s software fortune adventure in creative scorekeeping

When you heard that the Texas computer-services giant EDS gave the Maine Learning Technology Initiative – Gov. King’s famous laptop program and all its lesser-known siblings – $400 million worth of software, did you: (A) break into a happy dance at the breathtaking (the governor’s word) generosity of this astonishing gift? Or, (B) raise a wary eyebrow and think that no one – not even a company founded by a person of such breathtaking loopiness (my word) as Ross Perot – gives away $400 million worth of anything?

Whether you’re a gullible A or a skeptical B, the important thing to Maine is that it’s a dandy gift. The software, a couple of varieties, is what engineers and scientists use for all sorts of high-level designing and modeling and forecasting. It will really help engineering and science students at the University of Maine and the technical colleges. It should help kids in high school and junior high get interested those careers. It’s a gift of value and is much appreciated.

But the stated value is simply loopy. It’s calculated by taking what EDS would charge for one installation of the software, plus all the upgrades and tech support and such, and multiplying that by the many, many thousands of computers in Maine schools and colleges. No business buys software that way. That the state of Maine would if it could is beside the point.

Call this gift worth $4 million and it’s wonderfully generous. At $40 million, it would be astounding, though straining credulity. At $400 million, it’s just plain silly and it spoils the effect. Might as well call it $400 bazillion if staying in touch with reality is not an issue.

Why the overreaching? Maybe it has to do with EDS’s staggering financial troubles – collapsed stock price, lost contracts, disastrously revised earnings projections, a stock-option plan gone horribly wrong, an SEC inquiry, questions about compliance with the federal law that protects employee retirement funds and other Enronish matters. The question of how EDS would benefit from pumping this gift up into $400 million worth of favorable publicity or accountancy is secondary to the question of whether Maine should be endorsing something so reeking of ulterior motive.

Maybe, too, it has something to do with the stated intention of many incoming legislators, soon to face the staggering financial troubles left by the current governor and Legislature, to gut the laptop program first chance they get and the governor’s reckoning they won’t dare touch a program that brings in $400 million gifts. In any event, the people of Maine – and any interested EDS-watchers – have just been asked to believe something that is unbelievable.

The practice of public-private partnerships producing grossly exaggerated paper profits for popular consumption seems to be quite the little trend these days, kind of a Potemkin balance sheet. No sooner, for example, had the nationally-reported innovation of businesses donating police cars to municipalities in exchange for advertising space on the cruisers been initiated than critics began noticing a marked increase in the stated value of these cars that make it a deal too good to pass up. What city council can turn down a donated $35,000 Crown Vic, even if the ones they used to buy for themselves cost $21,900?

Maine doesn’t have any black-and-whites with golden arches on the hood yet, but it does have schools with some very expensive scoreboards in their gyms and at their athletic fields. It also, as the new anti-overweight campaign by the Maine Bureau of Health notes, has schools with lots of soda machines. There’s a connection.

It seems soda distributors here, and in many other states, have a long-established practice of donating scoreboards to schools. These gifts – pitched as worth $8,000 or $10,000 or even, as was the case in Brunswick, $15,000 – are absolutely free. Absolutely free provided the soda distributor gets ad space on the scoreboard and the exclusive rights – concessions stands and vending machines – to sell soda throughout the school, even throughout the entire school district, for a certain period of time, often five years.

Read through a stack of school-board minutes on this issue and the pattern emerges. The board initially is reluctant to have such a strong soda presence in the school. The soda rep, often with an assist from the coach, points out how deprived the school’s fine young athletes would be without a scoreboard valued at $15,000. The board, shamed at having even considered such an affront to the school’s honor, caves in.

Call me a (B), but, having bought my fair share of light bulbs and wire over the years, I wondered how something that essentially is little more than a box filled with light bulbs and wires (OK, there’s a buzzer, too) could cost anywhere near $15,000. So I checked with several manufacturers of scoreboards widely used by schools and colleges throughout the country. The basic model – time, period, score – runs $1,500 or so. Add a few features – fouls, player stats – and you can get into the $3,000 to $4,000 range. For flashing pictures or scrolling messages, add another grand. For $8,000 or $10,000 or certainly $15,000, your new scoreboard had better be able to predict the final score. And fetch you a soda.

The funny thing is that I was just thinking during the recent political campaigns about how one result of all the recent financial mayhem is that suddenly you no longer hear politicians say government ought to be run like business. Government never caught up on the good part of being like business – efficient, productive, results-oriented – but it’s gaining fast when it comes to fudging revenue forecasts and hiding debt. As for gross exaggeration, score it a tie.

Bruce Kyle is the assistant editorial page editor for the Bangor Daily News.