Peter's Park Planning

I was at a community meeting tonight at the Cathedral. Peter's Park is one of the parks I coach baseball at in the South End. We have been promised a remodel for years, and we finally have $600,000 earmarked for it.

The good news is that they seem to have retained all the elements that people want. The bad news is that they say they are over budget with their design.

And they won't tell us how overbudget they are. But, they ask people to work out in breakout groups their thoughts. A pretty fruitless conversation. Why can't these people be honest with us and tell us what they are over budget by? Can't the public be trusted with the dangerous information of how much it costs to move a tennis court by 50 feet? Or how much it costs to put up a fence around a kiddie playground?

God knows you might be able to bring down the government with that kind of information.

Here's an idea I use out here in the business world. I have the architects design something that can be built with the money we have allocated for the project. And I don't waste further money by having architects continue to do revisions without any of them being within the budget.

And we wonder why property taxes are going up by 9.2 percent this year. I campaigned telling people they were going up 9 to 10 percent, amazing what quantitative analysis will do.