Perhaps filed under the category of exceptionally unsurprising investigative journalism is this story from our own Journal-Constitution. Atlanta city government, it says, has paid more than $1.25 million in property damage and personal injury settlements from 1 January 2010 to 21 October of this year. This does not include lawsuits against the police or fire departments, or any action taken by those departments to mitigate past structural mistakes.
I must confess to being lucky enough to have never fallen into an open water meter, nor to have paid $325,000 to somebody who did. Still, it's difficult to imagine that a city with the money to pay these settlements hasn't the money to prevent a lawsuit from happening. More unsettling is the apparent lack of moral imperative to make this city a reasonably safe one in which to walk, drive, or detect smoke in one's home.
My brain's running on empty today, so here's a spontaneous outburst of corny metaphors for city government: think of your job as the opposite of a video game. When you lose money in court, there is no reset button to revert you to your last save point. When the job gets too difficult, you can't pull the plug. There are no cheat codes that you can use without at least one person finding out about it, against your wishes.
There is an infrastructural reckoning underway in Atlanta. It's time to gain control of our city's missing water meter covers, broken Prohibition-era water pipes, and crumbling streets.
Likewise, it is the responsibility of us citizens to report missing water meter covers, broken water mains, and potholes to the city.
No comments:
Post a Comment