Block · one region of the page, as the scanner read it. It may hold a whole story, part of one, several, or an advertisement; stitching blocks into articles is the next step. Text is supplied OCR.
Page 4 · column 4 of 7 · from the scan, no model involved
training exercise.
But, by Aug. 16, 26 days after the public hearing, when interrogated by the Rappahannock News, the Value Engineering crew had their story straight: Yes, they had been students. The project had been part of a course “to instruct us on the principals of value engineering,” said the team leader, a 27-year veteran with the Department of Transportation. Questions by the reporter concerning the recommendations and conclusions of the “academic exercise” evoked some rather comical back-pedaling on the part of the poor engineer who found himself, I suspect, very much “on the spot.” It’s all in the Rappahannock News, Sept. 1.
VDOT justifies the top secret classification now accorded value engineering studies by saying that they contain “preliminary bid and contract information which is protected under Section 2.1342(B)15 of the Code of Virginia.” This does not hold water, partly because section “2.1342(B)15” has nothing to do with this sort of thing (pertaining, instead, to “vendor proprietary software”), and because whatever information there is in any publicly accessible document is available to anyone, contractor or otherwise, who wants it, and could not, therefore, provide any one bidder with an
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