Transportation activist Gretchen Schuldt has the goods on SEWRPC, finding through Open Records requests that the regional planning agency has recently spent or agreed to pony up $130,000 on image-building, while failing to find the resources to update its 32-year-old regional housing plan.
The agency is going to need more than image burnishing if it wants to save its credibility, as supervisors in both Milwaukee and Waukesha Counties, complaining about separate issues, are saying publicly that SEWRPC is increasingly out-of-touch with the counties that supply most of SEWRPC's funding.
What do you expect from a planning organization that produces flawed studies of rail transportation feasibility in Walworth County based on the assumption of $2.35 a gallon gasoline for the foreseeable future?
ReplyDeleteSeems like they need to blow cash on burnishing their image after pulling boners like this one.
SEWRPC needs to rip a page from what was the NIPC (Northeast Illinois Planning Commission) and actually come out with something useful such as their excellent booklet on natural landscaping for public officials, which actually creates a useful blueprint for local governments to go native to clean up our stormwater and reduce energy usage.
Pretty logos and PR are not going to accomplish anything remotely useful. Do Republicans run this? Like the PR industry, they are obsessed with image, not substance. I could spend an hour on Google and come up with more useful information.
Seems to me also that $130,000.00 would provide a heck of a lot of staff time and upgraded server hosts to prepare, upload and distribute pdfs of SEWRPC's reports and studies so we can access them on line, rather than have to order/pay for them.
ReplyDeleteI find it abhorrent that they collect taxes, yet they do not make a lot of their information easily accessible to the affected public, or even charge for it, while spending money for empty PR excercises.
Last I heard, was'nt government supposed to serve "the people"?