Municipal

Common Sense would be nice.

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Any regular patron or minimally observant staff member of ARC will tell you that January, with its large influx of New Year’s resolution exercisers, is the busiest of the winter months. They can also tell you that as January progresses the New Year’s resolution people fall away and the crowd thins back out.

So if you were scheduling maintenance that would close the men’s and women’s change rooms for three days each, forcing people to change in the family change rooms you would schedule this maintenance for … the first week of January if you are the City of Abbotsford.

In keeping with the effort to maximize inconvenience and hassle for patrons: rather than schedule the closure for Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday one week and the same three days the next week you would of course schedule the maintenance for six days in a row.

That way rather than closing only on the quietest days of the week you include Thursday (cheap swim), Friday (longer public swim) and Saturday (public swims and a pool rental with 2 – 3 dozen people wanting to change at the same time) allowing the city to annoy and torment as many patrons as possible.

Mayor George Peary says he wants to bring change to City Hall. I would suggest he make his #1 priority introducing Common Sense into city behaviour and decisions.

Municipal

Nice non-work if you can get it.

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Obviously I missed something in our recent municipal election.

Although I am not sure how as I attended all the all-candidates meetings listening carefully to everything the candidates said and paid careful attention to the media to ensure awareness of the issues and ideas candidates were speaking of.

Yet somehow I managed to miss our recently elected and/or re-elected mayor and council members speaking of the need to hold council meetings only twice a month. Or was this a possibility our elected representatives felt the public didn’t need to know? Something to be added to the long and growing list of issues and costs that the public does not need to know anything about?

This 50% reduction was approved on December 15th at the last council meeting of 2008 – just before taking a month off. Apparently they felt the need to rest up before beginning their arduous new twice a month schedule.

For the sake of accuracy – with 52 weeks in a year a bi-weekly schedule would entail 26 meetings a year, not the 24 on council’s 2009 schedule. Council is neither meeting bi-weekly nor every other Monday but twice a month.

It is this lack of attention to detail and to reality which has the City burdened with massive debt and debt repayments and having the need to invest tens of millions of dollars in infrastructure at a time the city is facing declining revenues and with most taxpayers unable to afford any tax increases.

Abbotsford is facing harsh fiscal realities as a result of council’s past actions. Under this grim reality the economic slowdown would not seem an excuse to kick back, take it easy, meet less and twiddle ones thumbs but a call to action.

I had not realized that council had all its’ infrastructure projects in a state where they are ready to break ground the day after receiving funding.

The federal government is readying to apply economic stimulus through spending to invest in infrastructure. With stimulus the purpose of this spending it is the projects that are ready to break ground immediately, not in six months or a year or two, that will be receiving funding.

To benefit from this federal largess council must have infrastructure projects ready for an immediate ground breaking, not be sitting around waiting for money to fall into their laps – we all know, and are paying for, how well that worked with Plan A.

With the economy in the shape it is in, the attraction of business and development is not only highly competitive but is becoming more competitive all the time.

Council needs to spend time expediting matters that are tied up in City Hall’s bureaucracy. Such positive action would serve to counter Abbotsford’s reputation as a bureaucratic red-tape nightmare which moves with snail like speed and is the last place one wants to do business.

The city needs to be aggressively competing for business rather than sitting around watching business and revenue fall. Taxpayers can no longer afford to make up the difference between council’s budget revenue numbers and the real world revenue levels.

Of course in the real world the economic slowdown is reason to work twice as hard, not an excuse for a 50% reduction in efforts.

If council is finding it difficult to stir themselves in the face of the economic slowdown they could use the extra time available at council meetings to consult with the public as to the publics priorities, where to reduce expenditures to offset the reduced revenue, ideas on attracting business and revenue and ideas on ways to save money through expenditure reductions.

Not to forget homelessness, poverty, children going to bed hungry at night, a food bank facing the need for new premises to meet ever increasing demand while donations decline, a host of social problems made worse by economic realities real people have to face, etc.

Consult the public – as they should have consulted the public on cutting council meetings to twice a month during the recent election rather than waiting until safely elected (or re-elected) before springing this on the electorate.

As a suggestion from the public on cost reduction: since council ran on a platform that included weekly meetings, it is reasonable to divide their yearly salaries by 52 and pay this amount for each council session actually attended.

Unfortunately council is unlike the poor taxpayer who, upon deciding by/for themselves to only show up half the time, would quickly find themselves seeking other employment.

Hmmm

Be aware to Beware …

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“We need to get those MP3 players purchased and ready” I was told the other day. I had been volunteered to write a proposal for funds to replace the old, bulky and failing cassette-tape walkmans with MP3 players. The proposal was successful and the funds await spending.

I ducked the statement and avoided committing, not because I seemed to have now been volunteered to carry out the acquisition and preparation of the MP3 players, but because I have become aware of the reality and dark purpose driving the iPod/MP3 player revolution. Aware of what the real source of the technology behind the small, lightweight size of current digital music players with their large memory capacity and flexible music loading and playing management systems is.

All of these innovations were designed to maximize the number of people using this new generation of digital music players. The stratagem has worked and the use of these digital audio devices has become ubiquitous within our society. It has become “normal” for human beings to be seen to have a tendril running from an ear or ears to disappear into the persons clothing and for the person to appear distracted or “not all there”.

Seeing a person in such a state we automatically assume that the tendril is a wire(s) connected to a speaker in the ear and that at the other end of the wire(s) is a digital audio player. Since digital audio players are now so small we find nothing unusual in not seeing the device the “wire(s)” are assumed to be attached to.

I spoke of it becoming normal for human beings to be seen with thin tendrils running out of their ears and down to somewhere on their bodies because this digital audio technology is of extraterrestrial origin.

I can hear you and your sceptical “not another wacko alien conspiracy to take over the human race”.

I do not blame you for that attitude. After all, the human race has been brain washed by the government and media to believe that aliens do not exist and that even if they did exist, aliens have the fatal flaw of rushing into their conquest of humanity. Thereby permitting a miraculous, if improbable or impossible, salvation strategy to be found by the handful of humans aware of the impending doom to not only overcome the obstacles presented by the inertia of disbelief of billions of humans and the actions of humans already controlled by their alien masters but to successfully destroy the alien conquerors.

It was with those in media that we first began to become use to seeing human beings with tendrils (wires) leading out of their ears out of sight. It was in media that we also became use to seeing the lumps of what were assumed to be merely electronic devices under the clothing of those with tendrils running from their ears.

The truth is that any race that has learned to cross the vast distances of space has had to learn patience.

Reality is that, faced with the inertia of billions of humans and opposed by those already become hosts, a handful of human beings cannot save the human race from becoming hosts to their alien parasite masters without somehow managing to expose the truth of this slow moving conquest to humans as yet without a “puppet master” alien parasite directing and controlling them.

So begins the defence/salvation of the human race by those aware of the reality, the truth, behind the digital music player revolution and alien conquest strategy.

This awareness cannot be shouted from the rooftops. That would only warn the would be alien conquerors/enslavers, advance the alien conquest by making the shouter and his claims a laughingstock, imperil the shouter and others aware of the slow subjection of humanity occurring and deny those aware of the conquest underway the time needed to disseminate knowledge of the truth and assemble an army to defeat this insidious threat to the future of the human race.

No, this information must slowly be disseminated through out the entire human race so they can be on their guard and become ready to repel this invasion.

Now YOU know. Pass it along quietly and carefully. Be prepared to answer when the call for action to throw off these alien masters and their lackeys comes.

Until then to avoid servitude, avoid anything that would make people use to seeing you with a tendril running out of your brain (ear), as do I. Temporize.

Caveat.

Media

Media changes a MUST.

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I solidly agree with Mark Latham’s conclusion that currently media is failing miserably at asking the questions and providing information which the public needs to make informed decisions; failing to lead debate and discussion on important local, provincial, national and societal issues; being more focused on the comics (style) than stimulating debate and discussion (substance).

Indeed, I have expressed my opinions on these failings to the local publishers and editors as well as to the CEO of the corporations owning the Abbotsford newspapers.

However I think his concept of creating another government bureaucracy to address this pressing and important problem/issue is based too much on “thinking within the box”.

Given the effect that the internet is having on information dissemination, the rapid technological changes (pod/web casts, digital recording and editing etc) and the current operational and fiscal realities of print and broadcast media I think that the media is in such a state flux, even chaos, that “thinking outside the box” is where the best solution or solutions will be found.

Rather than seeking to find and impose “the” solution I would argue that the best approach would be to encourage experimentation.

In that regard I would like to draw attention to the current inform the public/ask the questions/raise the issues/wide open debate/readership inclusive/it is about content media experiment taking place in Abbotsford, BC.

A brief background: Abbotsford has two chain owned local papers; a third paper, The Post, was started up with much more open and interesting editorial content than either of the two long established chain papers; The Post was bought out by Canwest Global, owners of the Abbotsford Times, who proceeded to gut all the editorial content and turn it into a entertainment insert – managing to turn what had been interesting reading into boring entertainment pabulum.

In October of 2008 AT (Abbotsford Today) was launched at www.abbotsfordtoday.ca. The four columnists dropped from the pages of the Post became columnists for the new AT. While originally envisioned as strictly an online publication Abbotsford Today currently publishes a monthly print news-magazine edition supported by local advertisers and reader subscriptions.

I state upfront that I know the people involved in putting AT together. I was a booster and supporter of AT’s editor when he was involved in founding The Post. I enthusiastically cheered the people involved on when AT was merely a glint in their eyes. Not because they were friends but because Abbotsford so badly needed an open and free news/opinion/issues media voice. And if this experiment was successful it could be adapted to and implemented in other local (even provincial or national) markets.

There are several things I particularly liked about this model.

It reminds me of the local paper I grew up reading. Local ownership so policy is set locally; reader subscriptions mean that content has to be of interest to the readers, the paper is not just the wrapping for flyer delivery; the end user (the reader) evaluates the content and its usefulness or interest and expresses that by subscribing or not subscribing; local businesses/advertisers get to participate and express their support/thoughts thru the purchase or non-purchase of advertising.

The major web presence means timely presentation of the news and breaking stories/issues. It also allows more reader participation – letters to the editor, stories, comment and all the space needed for reader writings. It allows more content since it is not limited to X number of pages.

The model is flexible, adaptable and evolving. Given the state of flux, chaos and change media is in at this time these characteristics are needed if we are to arrive at a product that delivers the information and content that readers not only want but need.

It is this state of flux, chaos and change media is currently in that has me favouring an approach to encourage experimentation and diversity rather than trying to find and impose “the” solution. Let market forces, the public and readers evaluate and judge the models. Then we can adapt and spread the models tested and appropriate to the media market.

It would be nice if there was a pool of money that could be used to provide seed funding for experiments such as Abbotsford Today and I would certainly encourage and support the establishment of such a fund.

Ultimately it comes down to the readers judgment as to the value of the media being offered to them. Which reminds me – I need to write a cheque and send in my subscription to Abbotsford Today.

***************************************************************************

New Ideas for the New Year, 2009 (http://www.thetyee.ca/News/2008/12/22/NewIdeas09/)
Idea #2: Voter-funded Media
Mark Latham wants readers to control the purse strings.
For a former financial executive, Mark Latham doesn’t have a whole lot of faith in the invisible hand’s power to give us the news we need.
Who can blame him? Two companies control half (http://www.cna-acj.ca/en/aboutnewspapers/circulation) of the country’s daily newspapers. Both plan big layoffs and one of the two, CanWest, is in 10-figure debt . South of the border, the company that owns the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune has declared bankruptcy (http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2008/12/10/ap5805933.html).
And even before the economy went into the tank, media critics ((http://www.freepress.net/media_issues/journalism) accused the industry of prioritizing financial over journalistic considerations.
But Latham believes he has developed a model that will increase the media’s public accountability while creating additional revenue.
“I don’t think you can get good enough media for free,” the founder of votermedia.org told the Tyee. “But the way you design the way media get revenue will affect the information you get.”
Voter-funded media (http://www.votermedia.org/)) evolved from Latham’s earlier work on corporate governance and is based on the simple premise that money persuades. Allow the public to make media funding decisions and news organizations will become more accountable to readers, rather than the advertisers or government who currently control the purse strings. The result, according to Latham, should be a knock-on effect leading to a better-informed electorate, better elected officials and better public policy.
Anyone could vote online to decide which news outlets should get a portion of a designated pool of public money. In theory, the funding model would free news organizations from the thrall of corporate advertisers while avoiding the risk of government control. But that doesn’t mean Latham wants to do away altogether with the dominant free-market system or the more traditional kind of public funding that keeps the CBC going. Instead, he sees voter-funded media as a third option that would foster greater media diversity.
Latham has tested his idea at UBC and Langara College during student election campaigns, in Vancouver during the six months leading up to last month’s municipal vote and now, province-wide ahead of the May election. Though he has struggled to attract and retain regular voters, he said he has been pleased with the wisdom of those who have participated. (Full disclosure: The Tyee finished tops in the Vancouver Election Blog contest (http://votermedia.org/van/totals.html). It initially encouraged readers to vote for it but ceased the practice several months before election day.)
Not so fast
Some media experts are sceptical.
Ross Howard, a journalism instructor at Vancouver’s Langara College, readily admits there are problems with Canadian media. They don’t question society deeply enough, they don’t cover the media well, there is too much corporate concentration and journalists working for major companies are sometimes “inhibited or self-censoring.”
But he worries the public could value entertainment over the need for a watchdog and imagines a scenario where “52,000 teenage boys would all get online and vote for Monster Truck Magazine.”
Latham argues that even individuals who spend their time and money on infotainment may rationally decide to allot public funds to a service they recognize as essential, even if they only use it for 15 minutes right before an election.
“The value of media is not measured by the amount of time you spend watching it,” Latham said.
Stephen Ward, the former director of UBC’s School of Journalism who is now at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, likes the idea of public input into the distribution of media funding, but also worries about the outcome of a “popularity contest.” What’s more, he wonders if voting on the finished product might not mean the evaluation is coming too late.
“It’s too based on what people have already done or are doing when, in fact, we know that one of the things wrong with our journalism is that we don’t do stories about many, many stories in many, many parts of the world,” he said. “So how does that get onto the agenda?”
Latham admits there will be growing pains but believes time will allow media organizations to develop a track record that will let the public vote accordingly. He argues readers may reward an initially unpopular editorial stance five years down the line.
“After it’s been running for a while, I think what you’ll see happen is new media will grow that are serving this source of revenue and they will build reputations that will appeal to the voters so that they’ll get more revenue,” he said.
For a few dollars more
The source of the money for voters to distribute could pose another challenge.
“The idea is the funding should ideally come from that voting community if that voting community has a pool of funds, whether it’s corporate funds or tax funds,” according to Latham. “It would be in the interests of the members of that community to fund a blog ranking because they’ll get better information for their voters.”
But Kathleen Cross, a lecturer in communications at Simon Fraser University, believes Latham will have a hard time convincing people the media require more public funds.
She thinks objections are likely from both the public and those within the media industry concerned, perhaps mistakenly, that such funds will translate into government control.
“There’s a lot of resistance to channelling public funds into something that supposedly doesn’t have accountability,” she said. “When you look at the kind of critiques of the CBC in the last 10 to 15 years, it would be even more so with this kind of a system.”
And yet, media subsidies are not uncommon in Europe where Cross says a number of countries tax commercial media revenues and redirect the money to organizations that do not rely on advertising.
The CBC aside, Canada has some modest federal subsidies of its own, such as the Canada Magazine Fund, which promotes Canadian content and the Publications Assistance Program, which provides postal discounts for magazines and non-daily newspapers.
Howard would like to see such subsidies increase “massively” and thinks it would be useful to see federal funding agencies test Latham’s idea for a year without actually disbursing funds.
“I’d like to at least see if, through a website, you can test this proposition that Canadians will repeatedly vote in favour of what they like in the way of media and that when you total it up, it won’t all just be entertainment media,” he said.
Tomorrow the world
Despite her reservations, Cross called Latham’s idea “bold” and said it could serve as a partial antidote to the advertising-based system, which often produces coverage that is “problematic and unrepresentative.”
Ward points to the year-old ProPublica, funded by an American private foundation and specializing in investigative reporting, or the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, which gives money to approved projects, as other ways of promoting alternative journalism. He doesn’t want to discourage creative ideas but suggests Latham’s model needs some restructuring.
Latham is the first to acknowledge voter-funded media is a work in progress. Right now, his primary focus is creating a new website, or “building a better mousetrap” as he puts it, in the hopes of adding to the disappointing 450 voters who participated in his first large-scale trial.
But the fact that voter-funded media is still very much at the experimental stage isn’t keeping Latham from dreaming big.
He envisions a system where each country, province, municipality and its corporate stockholders, labour unions and professional associations could weigh in.
“The idea is to have a blog ranking and competition — a separate competition — for every voting community in the world.”

Consider, Homeless

Generosity = ?

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Watching the 11 PM news on Christmas Days as the last minutes of the Christmas Spirit Season ticked away had me pondering the concept of generosity and what generosity truly incorporates and embodies.

In the 2 – 3 weeks before Christmas the news was full of reports of “generosity”. Christmas Day the television news had video and stories of the homeless and hungry being served their Christmas dinner. The front page of the local paper had a picture and story of Christmas dinner being served, with the local politicians et al photographed demonstrating their “generosity” by serving meals to the homeless and poor.

On Boxing Day bringing out cookies brought groans of “oh no – more food” from the homeless who have been so stuffed with food over the past few weeks, their stomachs are full to the point they have no room even for sweets.

The homeless have also faced the “generosity” of being given so many gifts that they need a pack mule to carry everything around with them.

Yet as we move into the New Year of 2009 the homeless and poor will be hungry and in need of gifts once again, but alas “out of luck”. Until the 2009 Christmas Spirit Season opens again and “generosity” is once more a required must do.

So what is generosity? Is serving Christmas dinner or donating a gift to a Christmas bureau generosity?

Or is true generosity something that lives within a person, practiced and reflected in that person’s behaviour 365 days a year – not something switched on for the three weeks before Christmas and put away on the day after Christmas – Boxing Day, the High Holiday of Greed.

Consider that the politicians photographed serving Christmas dinner to the homeless have the ability to take the lead in ending homelessness. Yet year after year they have chosen to make excuses, shuffle paper, point fingers – but not to bestir themselves to create a single bed for the homeless or to provide leadership to end homelessness.

Ponder the question of whether loading the homeless down with gifts to the point they cannot carry it all is generosity or thoughtless behaviour? Would it not be more beneficial to the homeless if this largess was spread out over time? Of course that is neither as publicly visible nor as easy, requiring time and effort beyond the Christmas season generosity window.

One of the casualties of having embraced greed as the economic, operational and philosophical base for our society is having lost the understanding of what generosity is; as we become more self-centred and significantly less generous, except where required or it is politically correct.

What type of society we want for ourselves, our children and our children’s children?

Do we want to continue to have the kind of society we have built with greed as the economic, operational and philosophical underpinnings?

Or do we want to nurture the flickering flame of generosity into an incandescence that lights and enlightens our society?

Generosity does exist, lived and practice by some members of our community.

One of the meals served on Christmas Day was on a small bit of parkland on Gladys Avenue. It was a little late being served because it was first necessary to bring in a front end loader to clear the snow in order to be able to set up the tables, chairs and serve the food.

While this meal was served on Christmas Day it was not served because it was Christmas Day but because it was Thursday and Christmas just happened to land on a Thursday this year. There is a group of individuals who have been serving dinner on Thursday nights come sun, rain or snow.

Ironically, in light of the season, they were serving food to the homeless in the snow and cold because none of the three organizations calling themselves Christian in the area are willing to allow them to use their premises, for the winter months only, to provide shelter from the weather to the people being served dinner.

Ironic that with all the cries about the need to keep Christ in Christmas it seems to have been forgotten, or the understanding lost, that it is not about one day or even a short-lived season but about keeping Christ and the spirit of generosity alive in our hearts and behaviour through the entire year.

As the blank pages of the New Year unfold, what will you choose to write upon those pages in 2009?