As I had suspected, the re-emergence of street questions led to a surge of visits, much more popular than the poetry and miscellany that I otherwise offer. But then every one here uses the streets, so the interest is natural.
And the streets articles generate comment as the poetry does not, intelligent, insightful comment. The ever popular Mervingian points out that the last bond issue was to have been directed at street maintenance and wonders where the money has actually been spent. His words:
Didn’t you know that is why we need a $50 million bond issue?
If you have to send yet another request, might I suggest asking which budget fund the money came from. We still have $5.2 million for street repairs left from the last bond issue and I am also curious why I have seen no preventative maintenance (sealing, etc), when we bit the bullet years ago for it. That remaining bond money has lost about 1/3 of it purchasing power since we borrowed it.
Good question. Have we had any accounting on bond issues?
NOTE TO THE BV HERALD: How has the bond money been spent? I imagine a prize winning series coming out of that question. I’d take it up myself, but I have other projects in the table, don’t have the skills to tackle it without being susceptible to being bullshat, and don’t have the hundreds of dollars for copying and staff time I seemed to be threatened with were I to continue my inquiries about Pablo Kisel.
Someone known as ChallengerTX made bitter commentary on the state of the city administration:
North Main Drain? The North Main Drain is the City maintained Drain next to Target on Boca Chica. The Drains that cross Pablo Kisel are operated by Cameron County Drainage District One. They are Ditch Number One by the El Chaparral Subd. and the Nopalito Drain next to Circuit City. It is sad that the Director of Public Works cannot even differentiate between city drains that are under his control and county drains that he has nothing to do with. By the way, if the amount is over 20k, then it is probably illegal under the Texas Engineering Practice Act, considering they didn’t utilize the City Engineer to draw up plans and OVERSEE the construction. They also more than likely didn’t use a quality control geotechnical lab, as required by the Engineering Department. But, then again, that’s Brownsville!
I might not have put it quite so acerbically, but the point that we need to have genuine, certified experts in charge of these kinds of operations is well taken. To my knowledge, we have perhaps one engineer on the payroll. This good-old-boy stuff that drags on and on in Brownsville is not good enough anymore. It’s more expensive in the long run and leads to the kinds of obfuscating, self-protective attitude I have run into in asking a simple set of questions about the cost of maintaining a street.
Why is it so hard to answer?
2 responses so far ↓
1 Patricia A // Apr 15, 2008 at 10:12 pm
I think it’s different when you post on streets because commenters can join you on reacting to something as oppose to reacting to you or something that you produced. There might be an issue of comfort level or not feeling adequate to comment on something like poetry.
2 Stan // Apr 15, 2008 at 10:32 pm
I strongly suspect you’re right about this. And actually I’ve gotten more than one comment on more than one poem.
Of course, I wrote a couple of them myself. Three, now. You’ve made a couple. John Goggin, my other brother, made a couple, although one of those might have been on MySpace, where this blogging madness overcame me.
And poetry, I’m afraid, is not esteemed as it once was. An awful lot of people look at it and its something like abstract painting to them. Of course, the way out of that is to re-assert proper reading habits, which for poetry means always aloud. One of my personal rules in constructing a poem is that it be immediate apprehensible. People have to be able to understand it in order to have any feeling about it.
But again, the secret to that is to read it out loud. And usually slowly at first until you find the rhythm that the words are actually making. I spent many years with eighth graders reading “da-DA da-DA da-DA” and working very hard to get them to read as though they were actually speaking what they are reading. To my mind, that’s where you find the true poetry, in the sounds underlining the meaning just because they do.
But the conversation has opened. You never know what’s going to happen and my software’s not precise enough to tell me who is reading this or that. So you never who’s going to pitch in, and there’s always the possibility of a pleasant surprise when it happens. I remain forever optimistic.
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