State discovers lifetime supply of envelopes

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. -- Some state bureaucrats have been pushing the envelope -- quite literally.

The Office of Administration said Friday that it discovered tens of thousands of old envelopes while cleaning out the closets of a Jefferson City state office building.

Employees kept 56,500 of the envelopes, but an untold number of others were so old and yellowed they were thrown out, said Dave Mosby, director of OA's Division of Facilities Management, Design and Construction.

The envelopes that remain likely were purchased between 1995 and 1997, Mosby said, but he had no idea why his predecessors bought so many. At the rate the division mails items, it could take 40 years to use them all, the governor's office said.

Gov. Matt Blunt, who took office last year, touted the envelopes in a news release Friday as a prime example of the government waste his administration has uncovered.

Mosby said employees discovered the stockpile of envelopes while doing inventory last year after the merger of the facilities division and the design and construction division.

Blunt's administration on Friday also said it found 26 ladders, 100 quarts of two-cycle motor oil and three new weed choppers still in their boxes when the state privatized the operations of a St. Louis office building last July. It took a state truck six trips to bring all the building's stockpiled supplies back to Jefferson City, Mosby said.

"To me, it's the equivalent of if you cleaned out your basement or garage," Mosby said. "We're going through looking to see what's in our closets, what's in our warehouses, what's in our storerooms -- doing a complete inventory of our stuff."

Blunt emphasized that all of extra supplies were purchased before he took office.