Governor Carcieri yesterday asked the state police to “begin a preliminary review” of the way business has been conducted by the state Department of Transportation.

While the spending on in-house engineering and design staff decreased in the last six years from $35.5 million to $25.2 million, spending on consultants tripled from $22.35 million in 2002 to a projected $77 million in 2008. As a result, there is not one "expert" in hydraulic and geotechnical engineering on the DOT staff and outside companies, with markups from 65.94 to 210 percent for "overhead", are brought in with no expertise or procedure in place to insure efficiency.

The DOT now estimates, for example, that [Providence-based] Plexus Corp, with three big-dollar DOT consulting contracts, owes the state “approximately $8,000” as a result of the delays in lowering its overhead rate to a level auditors recommended.

Plexus has received $8.2 million overall from a decade-old financial-management tracking contract and two newer minority-company recruitment and contract schedule-monitoring contracts.