Royal flush
You know what the water bureaucrats have been doing in the two years since the drought of 2002? [“Hard water,” December 2, 2002] Revising drought numbers left over from 1930. No new pipes, no new pumps, no new dams. Just fiddling with numbers.
That’s what they told City Council in their report on Tuesday, February 17.
It seems the water bureaucrats have been sitting around twiddling their thumbs, watching the gauges drop and the reservoirs fill with silt year after year, decade after decade, generation after generation—secure in the knowledge that our water supply is safe, based on numbers compiled in the time of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Numbers from the time before Roosevelt was President, before Hitler was Chancellor of Germany, before Churchill was Prime Minister, before The King of England abdicated to marry Wallace Warfield and move to Nassau.
Twiddling their thumbs complacently throughout the entire 20th century—and all that time we paid their salaries. And we continue to do so. Then in 2002 the bureacrats slapped their foreheads and said, Oh, a drought. We’re out of water. Imagine that.
And there’s nobody in the entire water bureaucracy competent to decide what to do. They have to go out and hire consultants, because none of these in-house water bureaucrats has the faintest idea what to do.
And the first thing the consultants say is: Gosh, maybe we should revisit numbers left over from when the Next Big Thing was air travel by rigid frame dirigible. Let’s revisit the numbers, they say, trusty dusty old numbers compiled by ancestor bureaucrats, flappers who danced the Charleston.
And then we’ll go back to twiddling our thumbs.
If next summer there is another desperate drought, what has changed in the two years since the last desperate drought? Updated numbers. We can drink numbers. Flush our toilets with numbers. Fresh new numbers that are only 2 years old rather than 75. Then, by the time we actually get a decision, maybe we can teleport water from Mars. Surely there is enough water there?
My thanks to Councilor Kevin Lynch, who asked the right question, which is: What are we actually doing? Wish he’d gotten an answer.
Jock Yellott
Divine intervention
I just read and enjoyed Kent Williams’ recent write-up on the Academy Awards [“And the award goes to,” Film, February 24] and I wanted to point out something: City of God (Cidade de Deus) takes place in Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil. It’s a Brazilian, not Argentinean, movie. I thought you’d want to know!
Rick Britton
Charlottesville
Bell chimes in
I enjoyed reading the comments of my friends and neighbors in your article last week [“Who is the real Rob Bell?” February 24]. One correction: I like the Criminal Laws Subcommittee because it is not my committee with a lot of lobbyists or lobbyist interest. (It is another of my committees where all the lobbyists hang out.) Because it doesn’t involve large private interests, the Criminal Law Subcommittee is usually attended only by a handful of prosecutors, Aimee from the ACLU, some defense attorneys and a longtime Capitol observer named Roy. Much more than on other committees, we work cooperatively to improve the criminal justice system.
Regarding Pat Benatar, Mr. Borgmeyer betrays his age by referencing “Love is a Battlefield,” when everyone knows her best song was “Heartbreaker,” from her first album. “Love is a Battlefield” is especially inaccurate for an article about politics, given that Benatar sings about “no promises, no demands”!
Rob Bell
Albemarle County
Correction
In last week’s coverage of some State leaders’ push to force the construction of the Western Bypass [“My way or the highway,” Fishbowl, February 24], Butch Davies’ comment was presented in the wrong context in the pull quote that accompanied the article. “Local needs indicate the road ought to be built,” said Davies in reference to the Meadowcreek Parkway, not the Western Bypass. Davies’ remarks were presented accurately in the body of the article.