We love the Ward 6 Weekly; a propaganda email from Fred to his constituents, funded by taxpayers, where we can try to understand what Fred really means behind the happy-friendly-vague words he types. This week’s edition has a few good examples of Fred-speak that I’ll proceed to deconstruct for your reading pleasure.

Fred is still dancing around the Fantasy Island bike preserve issue. He is trying to sound supportive to the bikers & other grassroots citizens without actually promising anything that would keep him from re-zoning the land to sprawl subdivision status, thus pleasing his large homebuilder overlords. Let’s look at some examples:

Here’s Fred talking about the actions he will take to preserve the park:

“I sent a memorandum… asking City Staff… to begin meeting… to create a solution…”

[translation: "I'm punting the issue to bounce around the bureaucracy until it cools down."]

And here’s Fred’s “show of support” for the park: “I know and appreciate how important Fantasy Island is to the regular, and not so regular, users of this dynamic recreational facility. It is important to bicyclists in general as was evidenced by the resolution recently passed by our Bicycle Advisory Committee and it is important to me. As I stated at my Town Hall, I will not support HAMP until this issue is resolved.”

Note that he managed to never say anywhere that he supports the park.

[translation: "There's a lot of pressure on me right now from citizens, but I will not support the park if it gets in the way of my major sprawl-subdivision campaign contributors' ability to make money hand-over-fist building bad projects. I'm begging for somebody to bail me out of this one."]

In contrast, if I were already Ward 6 councilmember, I would say: “I unequivocally support the Fantasy Island park in its present location as a citizen-driven response to citizen needs. I will introduce a motion at the next City Council meeting to the Governor and the State Land Department telling them that this land must be preserved as-is and will not be rezoned for residential subdivision development. I have met with my fellow councilmembers and we have the votes to pass.”

Isn’t it time we had a councilmember willing to act and to talk with us in direct, honest language?

This entry was posted on Friday, March 25th, 2005 at 5:09 pm and is filed under Politician Watch, Respecting Citizens, Sensible Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.