No controversy in a desk

Published 8:34 pm Monday, December 29, 2014

It was the kind of rumor that just couldn’t possibly be true. Yet there it was, and as the weeks passed, it persisted, it gained traction and it began to take on a life of its own.

Suffolk’s city manager, it was said, was enjoying the luxury of a desk designed and built by Luzzo Bespoke to evoke memories of Bugatti, makers of iconic foreign sports cars that can cost a million dollars or more. Even the desk inspired by the car commands a shocking price tag, running to $250,000 or more if you can find it.

Everyone likes to complain about profligate government spending, but this would have been the new gold standard of such abuses. And yet normally level-headed people without a penchant for conspiracy theories had been convinced that City Manager Selena Cuffee-Glenn was ensconced in her new City Hall office behind the blue, polished-aluminum, 350-component, handmade, Bugatti-inspired desk featured in the rumor. Set aside the fact that only 10 of the desks were made.

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Except she wasn’t. In fact, a Freedom of Information Act inquiry, filed when the rumor seemed to have reached a critical mass in the week or two before Christmas, exposed the price tag of the desk, along with a photo of a dark wooden — rather standard, actually — executive desk in Cuffee-Glenn’s office.

An invoice from FSIoffice, an office furniture company located in Charlotte, N.C., showed the city had paid $2,060.10 for the city manager’s desk, about 0.8 percent of the rumored cost of the one conceived amid flights of fancy.

But people are never eager to let go of their conspiracies and controversies. (Think JFK, for instance.) So even after learning the new figure, certain naysayers refuse to back down. Even $2,000 is too much to spend on a desk, they say, and a $1.9-million bill for furniture and fixtures in the new city hall is evidence that city officials are ready to start lighting cigars with $100 bills.

But a simple online search quickly reveals a couple of things. First, the “furniture, fixtures and equipment” line of a construction budget usually covers quickly depreciating assets that are not directly connected to a building or property — everything from desks and chairs to movable partitions and other furniture to computers and projectors. Suggesting the city bought $1.9 million worth of desks and chairs is a bit disingenuous.

And second, even at $2,060, the city manager’s desk appears to have been pretty standard for institutional office furniture. FSIoffice is a well-known contractor for furnishing new institutional buildings, and the company lists many desks of similar quality on its website that are even more expensive. The $2,060 price tag, in fact, is on the lower end of the scale of what’s available there.

Certainly the city could have paid less for its office furniture. But the cheapest desks and chairs might not have been appropriate for a building that’s intended to serve the public for many decades. And even at the price that was paid, it’s hard to turn this particular expense into further evidence that city officials have absolutely no regard for taxpayers.

Sometimes things just really are what they are, and trying to hammer those things into some mold of controversy says more about the person holding the hammer than it does about anybody or anything else.