There you go.
The question is: Who owns government property? The fact is that the taxpayers own it. Regardless of which incumbent comes into the job, the facts are the equipment is only on loan. Although we purchase it doing our time or we may take some from a member who preceded us, it always belongs to the taxpayer. It is much like leasing property; it has to be given back in some shape or form.
In my case after I was elected I went with my predecessor to look at the inventory in the cold storage. I did not know whether it was the right or wrong inventory but I went through the facility. I said we would ship it out to my new office. It came a couple of weeks later. There was no problem at all. I opened the door to my new office. The fellows on the delivery truck came and I actually sent some of the equipment back. I said: "This stuff is in terrible shape. Take it back and I am going to have to deal with it some other way, but bring in the television and the VCR. They look a little old but bring them in anyway. Bring in the old cellular phone and we will make use of that".
A while later I thought we should check off the inventory. As the member for Kingston and the Islands has said, an inventory sheet is given to us. I checked the VCR off, no problem at all. What bothered me was that the inventory list indicated that these were recent purchases and they were high dollar items. The amounts were in the several thousands of dollars, even for the television and the VCR but I would not have given very much for what I received. The value of those items I received might have been $200 or $300 in total.
I thought that perhaps there was something wrong. Digging into it we did find that yes, all this new equipment was bought but it was not sitting in my office; it was somewhere else.