Forget the $600 hammer; Sonnenberg argues against $20,000 showerhead

You’ve heard of the $600 hammer, right?

It’s an urban legend of sorts, dating back to the 1980s and used as an icon of wasteful government spending.

The hammer was part of a Defense Department request. But according to Government Executive, the hammer never really cost $600, but due to an accounting error, the same overhead was added to the cost of a $15 hammer as had been added to much more expensive items in the Pentagon budget, and with a little help from the news media, the cost was reported as $600.

But the $600 hammer gave the public an idea of how government accounting works.

Fast forward to this month and a social media campaign by Republican Sen. Jerry Sonnenberg of Sterling and Republican Rep. Jon Becker of Fort Morgan. Both sit on the General Assembly’s Capital Development Committee, which reviews requests for funding for construction or maintenance at state facilities, ranging from colleges and universities to state-run human services.

For the past two weeks, Becker and Sonnenberg have been raising the alarm about what they called a $20,000 showerhead for the Colorado Mental Health Institute at Pueblo.

Thursday, Tony Giardini, who handles construction requests for the Colorado Department of Human Services, which operates the state hospital, presented a budget request for $235,109 to remodel 10 bathrooms. And he got a grilling from Sonnenberg about the costs of that remodel, at roughly $23,500 per shower. That’s more than it takes to remodel an entire bathroom, Sonnenberg told this reporter.

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