What City’s Consultant Said We Learned In Kindergarten
The Spokane City Council received few cheers for hiring a California consultant to coordinate its planning retreat.
But Bill Mathis already has begun producing a return on the taxpayers’ $7,000-plus investment.
After a preliminary study of the current council, which he described as dysfunctional, Mathis announced: “The first rule is ‘Don’t interrupt.”’
If that kind of advice is worth $7,000, how much will it cost to get planning, zoning and traffic management under control?
The more things change …
Did last fall’s elections truly put Washington, D.C., under new management?
The revolving-door tradition of ex-congressmen becoming lobbyists seems unchanged. Former House Speaker Tom Foley has signed on as an international-affairs specialist in a major law firm’s D.C. office.
Coincidentally, a former Foley colleague - in Congress and as far back as the Spokane County prosecuting attorney’s office - was in Spokane last week in his current capacity as a Washington, D.C., lobbyist for Washington state interests.
Like Foley, Lloyd Meeds is a Democrat. His associate, Tim Peckinpaugh, is a committed Republican.
They share a bipartisan conviction that, brave Newt world or not, outsiders still require experienced guides inside the Beltway.
“For constituents to be effective,” as Peckinpaugh put it, “they need to understand the niceties of the congressional process.”
If only a select few keys unlock the doors behind which elected officials do the public’s business, the last campaign’s message about returning government to the people rings empty.
A show of de-termination
On that theme, Newt Gingrich’s House of Representatives suddenly looks less eager to impose term limits on its own members than it was when so many of them campaigned for it last fall.
That’s OK. Popular or not, term limits are a flawed and simplistic dodge that lets citizens abrogate their duty to be informed and involved.
The candidates who campaigned for it were misguided. If they break their promise, that’s wrong, too.
Maybe two wrongs do make a right.
xxxx