Big city or small, the bureaucrats are the same. When the council members want to get rid of an unwanted idea, they send it to staff, for study. It is the route to oblivion. The idea is unlikely to ever surface again.
This is brought to mind by the machinations this week of Toronto’s antediluvian city council. They were trying to kill the first sensible plan for public transit since the first subway was built up Yonge Street more than 50 years ago. The council guaranteed many more years of traffic gridlock, lost hours and human tragedy in Canada’s major city. All they did was send it to staff to study.
It is the same in Babel. The best advertisement for this city that has ever been conceived went to the staff to study two years ago and will probably never see the light of day again. Every time they are asked about the particular idea, we hear that another study is in process and it is awaiting the findings. This idea is from a private group that wants to fund a single wind generator on top of the town dump. Visible for many kilometres, the turbine would say to the persons passing through town on the provincial controlled-access highway that Babel is an energy conscious city—a green and conserving city.
Speaking of conserving there was a very interesting proposal to divert the compostable garbage that Babel trucks some hundred or so kilometres away from town. This material is free bio-energy that can be used to generate heat and cooling for large groups of industrial and multiple dwelling buildings. With the city’s new lands that it obtained from a neighbouring municipality, it has the opportunity to plan and do things properly. The city can pre-plan the area allowing for underground piping of high and low temperature water to and from a central facility. The energy source can not only function without smell or noise but could be visually hard to find as well.
In a recent presentation at city hall of updates planned for the local sewage works, the city staff engineers and their consultants found that some local residents were well ahead of them in considering ways to improve efficiencies. They were given various recommendations for improving the volume and usage of the methane gas normally generated. While heat and energy needs of the facility are being offset, they were given several suggestions for expanding the capability and providing low-cost heating and cooling for nearby condominiums.
Oh well, maybe they will see the value in the ideas some day.
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Copyright 2012 © Peter Lowry
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