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Mind the Gap
Just when I had become quite comfortable entirely giving up on a council majority ever getting anything right, that damned Sherri Lightner comes a long and gives me some HOPE for our city government! There is no money in the FBA for this or any other project in University City because Mayor Jerry and the BIA have kept FBA fees from being raised and because the economic collapse has kept even the meager fees they have approved from coming in. (You think you know somebody who's upside down on an adjustable mortgage? The FBA is $35 million on the short side of what it was supposed to collect--now that's upside down.) But does that matter to Patti Boekamp, the hapless head of Engineering and Capital Projects? Nope, she understands, on a profound level, how comfortable and entertained observers like me are when the city once again does something magnificently stupid. So in an effort to give me some more political catnip, darling Patti proposed draining the $3 million left in the FBA and giving it to her pal Bruce McIntyre at Helix so that he could produce an EIR on a project that can't ever be built and for which there is no funding. Ah, the synapses of cynicism in my brain were just aching for the fix Patti was about to deliver. But nope, enter Sherri Lightner -- "Little Miss The Numbers Have to Add Up." Don't get me wrong--Sherri and Donna do us a great service showing how stupid the city can be; it really helps deepen the cynicism when two very smart people have publicly explained the inanity/corruption of what city staff wants to do and then the majority go along with staff. Yummmm. But not this time; Sherri was not only dead right on the merits, horrors of horror, she got a majority of the committee (and probably the entire council) to do the right thing! Now I have that most inconvenient of feelings, hope. Damn.— June 25, 2010 8:43 a.m.