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The decision is the message

Back in the day when Pharaohs ruled the civilized world, decision making was pretty uncomplicated. Make a decision, implement it, move on to the next monument to your greatness.
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Back in the day when Pharaohs ruled the civilized world, decision making was pretty uncomplicated. Make a decision, implement it, move on to the next monument to your greatness. If anyone complained, toss their sorry butt in a slave galley and send them off to fight the Phoenicians.

That sort of simplicity - with the notable exceptions of China and Burma - more or less disappeared after the French Revolution. Making decisions hasn't gotten any easier in the ensuing decades but implementing decisions has really gotten tough. Somewhere along the way, people have developed this unruly desire to be informed of the reasons behind decisions that affect their lives. Worse yet, they kind of expect to be informed before those decisions are implemented. Crikey, what's a leader to do?

Well, if you're the leader of Tiny Town, what you seem to do is get both feet stuck in déjà vuland all over again, and again, and again. The only thing worse than being pilloried for making the wrong decision is being pilloried for making the right decision... because you blew the whole COMMUNICATION thing. I'm losing count of how many times our noble leaders have been hoisted on the petard of miserable communication. Paid parking is just the latest contentious installment of this enduring soap opera.

It doesn't help any that the mayor and council, since their election in November, have been making out like Butch Melamed and the Hole in the Pocket Gang, spilling tax dollars like they had a printing press at muni hall and no real concern for the backlash headed their way. After all, we're hosting the Olympics. Can't be expected to run the town and do that at the same time.

But here's the rub. Paid parking is the right thing to do. You don't know how difficult that sentence was to write. Of course, the way Butch and the Gang have approached it is way, way wrong. How wrong? Let me count the ways.

Let's flashback to late last year. As memory serves, the economy and the municipal budget were on the radar screen during the election. All the candidates for all the positions, with the possible exception of school trustee, made the appropriate bleating noises about fiscal responsibility. But even before their nameplates had been made, they rubber-stamped the decision to spend over a million bucks for a new fire truck. Obediently demurring to the "experts" and invoking burning babies to blunt any critic's attack, they spent big when much of the rest of the town was rebuilding and retreading their old rides.

Before we'd fully recovered from that - and hey, why worry; it was in the capital budget - they dismissed as meaninglessly symbolic a motion to forego their own automatic pay raises. This was a particularly shortsighted decision. The money, in six out of seven cases, was chump change. But the moral high ground they pissed away by passing up this opportunity was, had they been thinking about what was coming down the road, golden.

Among other things, it cut the legs out from under them to engage in any meaningful talks with muni staff about moderating their automatic pay increases to help manage the gaping budget hole. It amplified the outrage people in town felt when they gaily decided to buy everyone at the Hall new Olympic jackets, spend a bundle on Olympic tickets for friends in low places and stick it to the taxpayers when budget time came around.

Then, while we all knew that pay parking was going to come to a couple of the new and improved day skier lots - but only after we don't inconvenience the Olympic Family - they use the cover of end-of-season to institute pay parking under the conference centre, much to everyone's surprise, and jack up the rates at existing pay parking locations.

And - you'll love this - they can't understand why people are pissed off!

There's this funny quirk of human nature, and here I think it's important to remember humans are just animals with an acute sense of their own mortality, that they generally get a bit testy when you take something away from them they've gotten used to having. Since parking under the conference centre has been free since, oh, it was built, it seems like anyone functioning at a high enough level to use a knife and fork without impaling themselves might just suspect taking it away would cause a mild stir.

Which raises the question, how might it have been handled differently? Glad you asked. For starters, we could have been told before it happened. Better yet - and I take no credit for this idea - they could have announced the first new pay parking lots would be the ones at Muni Hall, outside the cop shop and fire station, at the library mahal where there are four free staff spaces, and anywhere else it might have inconvenienced the chosen ones. But just to give you some insight, this idea not only didn't occur to them, there's still some fierce resistance in the Hall to doing it. Carumba!

I'm not sure what the logical rationale is to saying pay parking is a good thing for others to do while you're not willing to do it yourself but I think the ancient Greeks had a pretty good word for it: hypocrisy.

Be that as it may, it hasn't made sense for a number of years now that parking in the centre of the village, in an underground lot, is free. I'm not sure where, outside of Mayberry, you'd find a deal like that in this century. If the village merchants are passionate enough about keeping parking under the conference centre free, let them pony up the same way Marketplace merchants do to offer their customers free parking. After all, nothing's free; it's all just a question of who pays.

And I don't think charging for parking in the prime day skier lots is going to keep very many visitors from driving up for the day. Having said that, I don't think it's going to encourage many more people to choose the numbing inconvenience of waiting for the WAVE or riding their bikes through deep snow in ski boots. I think it's important at this point though to at least acknowledge that pay parking isn't a stupid idea. It's a progressive idea which, like so many, is just a bit distasteful.

But you'd think one of these days, someone - either elected official or senior staff - would appreciate the fact you can't just implement decisions like this with Pharaonic disregard for the potential slave uprising to follow.

Meanwhile, I'm not holding my breath. I do hope, however, there's a raucous Q&A session at the beginning of next week's council meeting when Councillor Lamont's motion will be discussed... and dismissed.