government competence, on tasks both big and small
http://www.tucsonteaparty.org/?p=6
The Tucson City Council proposed a myriad of tax increases, including a 2% tax on renters, increased utility, garbage, and water fees, a doubling of the hotel bed tax, and others.
Warned that more than 1000 people would attend the rally, the City Council moved the meeting from City Hall to the Tucson Convention Center. However, the room they chose could only fit 500 people
I’m astounded at how often basic competence is sorely lacking.
I shouldn’t be.
May 6th, 2009 at 10:21 am
FYI… Loose bold html tag in this post.
May 6th, 2009 at 11:25 am
You say that like you think it was incompetence, versus a desire to prevent that 1000 people from showing up.
May 6th, 2009 at 12:49 pm
This doesn’t seem like very strong evidence of incompetence to me. What if “warned that more than 1000 people would attend the rally,” they had moved heaven and earth to find space for 1500+ people, and then only 340 people had showed up? Would that be mockable too?
Assuming for the sake of argument that the tea partiers reportage is more correct than the newspaper estimate of 700 (easy for me to believe, but not certain), the city misestimated attendance by a factor of 2 to 3. That doesn’t seem so bad to me for a first-of-its-kind event. I’ve had some contact with organizers for events related to geeky stuff like programming, chess, and robots. Accurate predictions of attendance for those events isn’t all that easy, and I’d expect political events have similar difficulties.
It gets a lot easier when the event has been run a few times; if this was the third time the same organization had protested a city meeting, and the city had erred the same way each time, then I might join the mockery. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.
May 6th, 2009 at 1:30 pm
I don’t think it was necessarily incompetence or ill-will. I was suggesting a potential alternative explanation.
Surely you don’t think it’s utterly impossible that some city council somewhere would pull such shenanigans in order to avoid being confronted by an angry citizenry.
May 6th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
In my earlier post, I was quibbling with the (in)”competence” in the headline of the original post, not with your comment. As it happens, though, I’m skeptical of your view, too. It’s not clear to me that the political cost of people shut out (demonstrating, and putting together snarky webpages contrasting official statements of openness with photos of large crowds locked outside, and so forth) is lower than the political cost of people let in. Thus, while I have no problem with models where political insiders yield to temptation, in this case I’m not so sure that the temptation exists.