Even in a small town — or perhaps especially in a small town — it seems like there is almost no end to the stupidity you can encounter in city government.
Here in our small seaside city of some 10,000 people there's been a lot of recent debate about what to do with the city's public golf course. Many people are up in arms over the fact that it costs money to maintain the gold course, and there aren't that many people using it. These folks would rather have that we have a dog park or some other kind of public space.
Of course, it always seems like everyone's input is centered around their interests, rather than a common goal of choosing the direction that's best of the city, in the longer term.
Whereas it is great that public input is being sought in this process, nonetheless the local city government seems to be acting unilaterally with a great deal of stupidity.
Bring in the Idiots!
Seems like the one place you can always count on idiocy to show up is when city government hires "Consultants" to come up with answers to community dilemmas.
I honestly have no idea how consultants get jobs in the first place nor how they stay employed because most of the things they seem to have to offer have absolutely no bearing on reality or anything else normal human beings understand.
To wit, a consultancy firm — from halfway across the country no less — was hired (at a cost of several hundred thousand dollars) to look at different options that might benefit this community. In their "infinite wisdom" — using just publicly published data, but never actually having "feet on the ground" here — they came up with the idea that probably the best thing we could do is to build a new aquatic center.
Although it's tough to determine where most of the stupidity lies, let's start with the fact that they have absolutely no familiarity with the local community, including the highly significant fact that our one public pool is running at a financial deficit and is falling apart mostly related to the fact that it sees almost no usage!
Moreover, the three major retirement communities here all have their own swimming facilities, meaning that those most likely to use a swim center already one, and right in their own neighborhoods!
In their continued Infinite Wisdom, he consultancy firm also used statewide population, demographic and income data as the basis for many of their findings, totally disregarding the fact that our particular city the demographics are nothing like the state media because we skew extremely old and extremely poor.
Meanwhile, aforesaid consultancy firm — knowing full well (hopefully knowing full well?) — that the city's primary reason for hiring them was to find ways to inexpensively bolster sagging revenues... shortfalls meaning a struggle to serve its citizens... managed to come up with the brilliant idea that we should build an aquatic center at a cost of 35 to 50 million dollars, the cost of which would be funded primarily through an increase in property taxes!
This, at a time when everybody's already struggling to pay their property taxes because of the insane rise in property values.
No wonder so many "no pool tax!" signs are showing up in front yards around our town!
We really like living here... but there's a limit to just how much idiocy someone can put up with... and pay for!
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