Texas Task Forces

Now there's task forces, and then there's task forces. It happens that I myself serve on one of those things called a "task force." Hellifiknow exactly what that makes me, but it sounded kind of empowering when I first got on it donkey's years ago.

While it's my heart's desire not to mix my work with this blog--and that is itself a mighty struggle--boundaries seem not to be my forte these days. I am, you see, on vacation. So why, you may ask (and so do I), am I working on a grant proposal for that blasted task force right in the middle of my vacation? Once more comes one of my favorite words: hellifiknow. (That's much more ladylike than damnedifiknow, y'know!)

The task force, just for a bit of context, is, in fact, a drug task force, 'cept we don't carry guns or wear badges. Well, a couple of folks have the badges, but nobody has any guns (so far). And the drugs are actually either the legal kind or the wannabe legal kind (as in fraudulent, counterfeit, hoax, generally bad for you).

And the grant is a federal grant. My least favorite kind. Everything has to be explained in detail. And, then, in the next section, it all has to be explained again, in the same detail, like they can't read the first section and figure out that it says the same thing. By the time you get to the fifth section, you've said it five damned (oopsie!) times in just about the same words and your face is turning red. Not to mention the bad words that have begun to creep into your project description.

I was just about finished--as in "let her finish the blasted thing up; she's the chair"--when I got to the budget. Well, now, a budget can be an interesting thing. Sometimes it can actually be kinda fun to be the girl who writes the budget. Or, in this case, the girl who edits the budget.

Once you figure out what the original budget is supposed to have done, you can tinker a bit. Up this number a bit (my plane ticket could cost more than that), lower that number a bit (who needs that many envelopes, for garden seed?). Then you can start thinking about what else should be there (oopsie, she left out the website domain cost). After you've whacked a bit here and there, you've saved up some money. Now what to do? What do we really need to make this task force better? Well, it wouldn't hurt to actually get the task force printer repaired rather than using mine all the time. How about that? And maybe some actual ink for the printer? Oooo, now it's getting good.

So you go back to add up the numbers, because there actually is a cap to all of this. It is, after all, a federal-state "partnership." You know, one of those things where the feds put out a pittance and expect the state to pick up the bulk of the tab, but the state passes as much of it on to the community (read "nonprofit organizations") as possible? (I would be "the community" in this little arrangement--and I get my money by standing on street corners with a tin cup--or something very like that.) So the whole thing can't be more than a ridiculously low total amount. (And, no, using federal ink for federal work doesn't bother my conscience in the least. Who do you think writes most of the educational material for this task force?)

Well, the numbers are adding up. I'm getting happy. I just have to make sure that all the quintuplicate narrative is matching the numbers--and what do I see? The aforementioned chair has made a monstrous error. Not an addition error, mind you. She just left out one-whole-honking-sixth of the budget. No wonder she had so much money left over for stamps and envelopes. She left out a whole task force meeting.

A whole meeting. One-sixth of the pitifully small budget. And we had talked about it at least three times. I could only laugh. The task force, you see, is a Texas task force. As in Texas, the state that could have been five states. The state that takes a couple of days to drive across. The state that takes several hours to fly across. Every year we have to explain this to the folks back east. Texas is b-i-g. So, to have a meeting of all the task force members, who live in places like Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, and even El Paso, we can't just hop in the car, drive an hour, meet a couple of hours, and be home for dinner. Somehow the guys in the east just can't seem to understand why it costs so much for a task force meeting.

It's expensive to meet. Airfare, hotel, per diem all mount up, even for just 8 people. But we cut our meetings down to twice a year and do as much of our work as possible by email and conference call. Our two meetings each year are training sessions, work sessions, business meetings, planning meetings--combined with community outreach in whatever city or town we are in (and we move around the state to maximize the outreach). We pile in everything we can to make the meetings "value added," cut every corner we can (e.g., some of us even car pool), in order to make sure that we have made our point ever so clear: This is a good thing. And then we explain the cycle of the year and the nature of the issue that we are dealing with so that it justifies the two meetings per year. Over and over again in that blasted proposal.

I really did laugh when I saw the missing numbers. It had to be some sort of reverse Freudian slip. We've just been battered so many times about those meeting costs, and I'm guessing that the chair (nice lady, overwhelmed by the fedspeak of the grant instructions anyway) just flinched.

But maybe it's time to fight back. The grant instructions do say that a map showing geographical location of the project can be attached. Maybe I should do that. I'm thinking that I happen to have a pile of old leftover TxDOT maps--with Ann Richards' picture on 'em. Maybe some hand lettered drawing with mileages and driving times might give them a clue to just how big Texas really is. A nice big, fold out map that covers their desk and slaps 'em in the face with the fact that it takes longer to drive across Houston than it does to cross Rhode Island (probably). Yes, that would be fun.

Of course, now I have to go cut stuff out of the budget in order to squeeze in that second meeting. That sucks canal water.

What I did on my vacation . . .