A serious case of scope creep

From FOX News:

WTC memorial magnificent, but at a steep price
With its huge reflecting pools, ringed by waterfalls and skyscrapers, and a cavernous underground museum still under construction, the National Sept. 11 Memorial and Museum at the World Trade Center is an awesome spectacle that moved and inspired some 4.5 million visitors in its first year.

But all that magnificence comes with a jaw-dropping price tag.

The foundation that runs the memorial estimates that once the roughly $700 million project is complete, it will cost $60 million a year to operate.

Some numbers:

By comparison, the National Park Service budgeted $8.4 million this year to operate and maintain Gettysburg National Military Park and $3.6 million for the monument that includes the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Running Arlington National Cemetery, which has more than 14,000 graves and receives 4 million visitors a year, costs $45 million annually.

I would love to audit the foundation. Where do they have their board meetings? What kinds of perks do the board members have? Their $60M annual fee is so over the top for a relatively smallish monument that there has to be some grifting and corruption going on. The idea that these board members would profit over the loss of 3,000 US Citizens is beyond my contempt. Some good news:

So far, Congress has balked. A bill proposed by Democratic Sen. Daniel Inouye, that would have had the National Park Service contribute $20 million per year ran into opposition from Republican Sen. Tom Coburn, who noted that the federal government had already spent $300 million on the memorial project.

A National Park Service official, William Shaddox, testified at a hearing that $20 million is more than the agency can afford, and larger than the entire annual appropriation for nearly 99 percent of the parks in its system.

Our National Parks system is in dire financial straits and this group of people wants to impose this kind of burdon on it. Talk about out of touch with reality... Scope creep? It's an engineering thing.