"When Talk is Not Cheap"

This was the title of an '80s book about choosing a psychotherapist. As it happens, it applies to us in the Village, too.

Yesterday, I ran into Tony Perez-Pinon at the park. His kid is doing great, so it seems. He recently had another surgery, but his arm functions very well. He seemed a bit shy, but he did open up a little. Anyway, I remember when Tony's sons got injured about five years or so ago, and the discussion that ensued, about changing the speed limit in the Park, which we did. The limit used to be 30 on all streets, and now it's 25 on all streets, except 6th Avenue and Griffing, which are County streets, and we have no say about the speed limits there. There was a lot of interest in lowering the speed limits on our streets, a good deal of discussion about it (largely in favor of doing it), and some genuine commitment, including spending the money, to taking this safety measure for the Village. Part of the issue, and it didn't get much overt discussion, was making our interior streets so burdensome to negotiate, with painfully low speed limits, that "cut-throughs" would rather just avoid the Village altogether, and cut through some place else. But the interesting part of this speed limit adventure was a traffic study we had done. It showed that most drivers didn't drive over 25 on our interior streets anyway. What with small streets and frequent stop signs, people just didn't drive that fast. And the person who hit Tony's kids appears to have been impaired, not speeding. So we went to trouble and expense, and talked a good deal about this issue, but we didn't accomplish anything. In fact, after the speed limit was lowered from 30, which no one drove, to 25, the police blotter showed that almost no speeding tickets were given on these interior streets, as almost none had been given before the change.

We also, a couple of years or so ago, spent a huge amount of time, and the money it takes to arrange that time and pay an attorney to keep us company, talk-, talk-, talking about FPL. We compounded the expense by having extra workshops about FPL, and there was lots of ex camera activity involving our attorney. Part of the issue was the Franchise Agreement we, and most municipalities, have with FPL. Some of us wanted a major change in approach between us and FPL, or didn't want the Agreement at all, and those who wanted change seemed to work hard, at all of our expense, to get it. What we wound up with was some minor and insubstantial change in the language of a few passages of the Agreement, and the things about which some complained and worried most were not a matter of the Agreement anyway. So we spent a lot of money, and even more Village peace and equanimity, to accomplish nothing.

In the past few years, there was abundant discussion about Commission meeting minutes. Some complained bitterly about them, considering them incomplete, flawed, an inadequate and unsatisfactory record of Village business, and sometimes even criminally corrupted. This was a very serious matter. And every hour of talk about this was an hour of the time of any residents who were interested enough in Village business to bother to come to meetings, an hour of Cesar Hernandez's time at the recording console, an hour of the time of the Comcast person, an hour of auditorium cooling, and an hour of attorney time. None of this talk was cheap. And it was made more expensive, in an abstract sense, by the damage it did to the general happiness of Village residents, who were dragged through struggle, misery, and polarization regarding these minutes. Once the plaintiffs were in a position to change the minutes, as they seemed to say they thought necessary and decent, they didn't bother, and instead, they simply compounded the work of the Village Clerk, who now spends such a sizable amount of her time trying to guess what Commissioners might want recorded in the minutes, that she has less time for her real work, resulting in part in our now hiring someone else to do part of the work she can't get done, because she's fooling with the minutes.

Not cheap? Sometimes talk gets really, really expensive. And we, the residents and taxpayers, which is usually the same thing, are the ones who have to pay for this loose and meaningless, and expensive, talk.