County (Not) at Work

Dear Editor,
    Just in case anyone still wonders why Travis County gets into budgetary problems, here are two pictures I just took (April 8, at about 11:45am). My wife and I were out for our daily walk, down through the Pedernales River valley at Hammett's Crossing. From a distance, we were pleased to see a county work crew out to clean up the mud deposited by yesterday's receding flood waters. As we got closer though, it became apparent that there were three dumptrucks, two pickup trucks, and six or seven men just sitting around, waiting for some sort of other heavy machinery.
    Now, under extreme mud conditions, this might not be too ridiculous, but the minuscule mud deposit there today could have been handled by two men with shovels, loading it into a pickup truck. When my wife suggested shovels to one of the four men in a pickup driving back and forth to set up flagger warnings, he said, "They didn't give us any." The crew has been out there for more than an hour now. At least a few of the vehicles' engines were running noisily and stinkily the whole time.
   I guess this show of force is overcompensation for the almost two-week wait we had to suffer for the sand cleanup after the last major flood. Or maybe they got grief because the one before that, it took a neighbor with his front-end loader to clear the road, long before the county even made a move in this direction.
   I firmly believe that even the county could be smarter, more efficient, and more environmentally sensitive than this.