After a brief stint in the hospital, the Observer is back and itching to catch up. One thing I noticed was the ridiculous discussion of police delivery of meeting agendas, a policy that has evidently been practiced for years now. Are you kidding me? We are using highly-trained officers that are charged with the safety of this town as messengers? Do we have no respect for our police that we send them off on senseless errands rather than allowing them to do the important jobs they were hired for?
Don’t we already have a courier method called the US Postal Service? No, that would make too much sense and cost us much less money. But here’s an even better one: email. You know, the thing all of us use every day. If you are such a knuckle-dragging caveperson that you can’t handle getting your information on a computer, what on earth makes you think you are qualified to help run our town in this day and age?
Don’t get me wrong—I came late to the party with these computers and I would still rather write things out with my pen. However, that’s not the way things are done now. I had to adapt. Even I know what a PDF is! Emailing lengthy documents is faster than any other delivery method and it saves paper for those times when you don’t need to print everything out. Add up the expense in time (both wasted as a resource and pro-rated as a portion of their hourly wage) resources (reams of paper on things like the Long Beach West proposal alone) and gas we’ve spent over the years on our little police carrier service. Got it? I’ll come back to this later.
Why do some on our council think we NEED to waste our police force resources so they can have their own “errand boys in blue?” Some say that not all town council members get to Town hall on a weekly basis. All the more reason for them to check their email—you know, the one they got when we elected them to watch over the town purse. It’ll be there every week, and sooner than their current hand delivery! Some claim the police patrol those streets anyway. However, cops don’t have time to canvass every street just to lay claim that they can. If I need a cop, I don’t want to wait because he or she’s delivering mail around town.
This is not a political issue, but one of common sense. Look, those who go to town meetings know that there are several council members who contribute nothing to discussions. Others, like Mike Julian, admit that he throws away stuff he doesn’t need to read. Even Mike Henrick himself said it probably takes these police couriers two hours to go 35 miles round-trip without traffic to deliver these packets. It’s an issue of waste, and one that is easily remedied. Kick and scream about all the other issues, but don’t cloud this one up any more than Joe Kubic or Gavin Forrester already have. They apparently don’t care about the union grievances registered against this practice by our police officers, but I respect them too much to ignore them.
In a time where every state and federal office has been issued mandated calls to go “green,” I defy anyone to stand up and tell me why you think our police officers should be messengers to the town council. I defy you to explain why a simple email is so beyond your abilities that you will ignore the pleas of your own police force in order to maintain a wasteful practice that we cannot afford in these times. Don’t hide behind your service to the town: if you waste my money, I don’t want your service!
Support our police force and help end this shameful waste of our tax dollars! If you need a little training on how to use a PDF, use some of that money you’ve been wasting on our police couriers. Read more of this observation!
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