The Postponement Post
Urban Oasis has a mordantly funny post on the council’s increasingly common “dog ate my agenda materials” postponements. (Yes, he posted it two days ago, but we wanted to postpone this post until we were sure about the merits.)
Of late, these postponements have become de rigueur — on building downtown, on adding parks to neighborhoods, and putting in sidewalks. Tonight saw a postponement of selection of the Village Green project for the First and Washington site. The (increasingly frequently cited) reason? A councilmember wanted more time to go back and familiarize himself with both proposals and think about their merits … Am I crazy in expecting that city council members will have read and thoughtfully considered all of the material on the agenda for each semi-monthly meeting? Am I alone in not being comforted by the mayor’s reasoning that a two-meeting postponement was not necessary since, if council wasn’t up to speed next time, they could just postpone it again?
Having witnessed the meeting in question, we felt that the vote on the Village Green postponement was premature and that the council should have postponed it until they had a better understanding of whether a postponement was necessary.
A notice to the readership:
It takes time to complete process of linking to the Urban Oasis page and giving Dale’s essay a thorough, studied reading. As a result, all early replies by aaio commenters to this thread have been postponed.
To set an example that may eventually spur the work of others, I’ve personally set a goal of finishing the reading and making a reply here before the next Council meeting. Or the meeting after that. Though this could be too ambitious, as currently there still remains on the streets a lot of art, or crafts, or products of some artisanal-like reproduction process that have yet to be viewed & appreciated for being whatever it is that they are.
posted by hale on July 20th, 2006 at 6:58 pm eExcellent post on postponement. There does not seem to be a way to calculate the cost of postponement to the city, developers, future homeowners, etc. Too bad.
posted by Dustin on July 24th, 2006 at 1:24 pm eThere’s an incredibly easy way to do it…….building permits always contains the cash value of the work being done. It’s pretty easy to calculate the taxes lost per month of delay.
I’m sure the tax losses due to delays runs into the hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.
An alert city clerk could come up with this yearly figure with little to no effort.
posted by todd on July 24th, 2006 at 2:29 pm e