This weekend a column from the City Manager of Grand Junction will appear in the Daily Sentinel. To begin with, I would like to say that I find it laudatory for the City Manager to not hide behind the "I am not an elected official" screening device traditionally employed in her position when asked for comment.
The unfortunate part is that the comment is entirely too clear, as we see yet another victim of bureaucratic thinkspeak; this being the peculiar malady of out of touch, unelected and essentially unaccountable officials who think they are In Touch with the population they ostensibly serve, when they are not and consequently speak what they think will be placating phrases, when they are not.
Without delving too tediously into the myriad problems we have in local municipal government, let us just say that bragging about preserving some portion of a broken and unresponsive status quo is hardly soothing to the taxpayer.
A fact that should be visible to someone with the eyesight of Mr. Magoo is that the city of Grand Junction has over hired, over supervised and in some instances overpaid its overgrown bureaucratic legions for the last 10 years and for the most part would better serve the public by allowing management staff to shrink to 1997 levels-- excepting the public safety component.
If this were the case I'm fairly certain they could afford a new public safety building.
Something certainly has to be done about the governmental structure of the city of Grand Junction and although we have a lot of other fish to fry, perhaps we had better mark it on our things to do list. It's obvious no one else is going to do it.
