Microphones, websites, and sewers: Where is the commitment?

When it comes to implementing technology, Shoreline's city government lacks commitment. Let's just turn it on, and see what happens. We can always fix it on the fly.

The City of Shoreline is notorious for suffering from technical difficulties in the Council Chambers. Sound system, projection screen, video presentations. They shrug it all off as though technology failure were a fact of life, like death and taxes. They show no accountability. They blame the system.

A City Council meeting is a board meeting. Very few would survive long in the private sector providing this level of service at a board meeting. Yet at City Hall, breakdowns like these are commonplace, and they are always because some human being let another human being down. Always. Blame, fault--these are human attributes. It is never the system's fault.

Because the City sees these problems as technical problems, and not as problems of commitment between human beings, they attempt to solve them with technology, instead of addressing the root cause first.

The City recently installed a brand new council chamber microphone system costing the taxpayers $12,000. It was supposed to provide more efficient meeting management for Council, Board, and Commission meetings.

Well they haven't got it working yet. (Sounds a bit like Obamacare, doesn't it?). Anyone who attended this week's City Council Meeting, Point Wells Open House and Workshop, or Planning Commission Meeting  (I attended all three) can testify to this. So far, all I have been able to detect is a mesmerizing bright red light bouncing from mic to mic, like Mitch Miller's bouncing ball.

Microphones aren't the only problem the City has experienced lately. On election day (November 5), the City's website search engine crashed. The City chose that moment in time to convert all their documents to a new format, breaking hundreds of hyperlinks and ruining everyone's bookmarks. On arguably the most important day in the year for obtaining information from the City, an inquiring voter got the following message instead:

ALERT: The City of Shoreline website platform has undergone a recent upgrade. This upgrade means that links have changed. We have asked Google to update their records to reflect our new links. We are keeping a close watch on when that update occurs. In the meantime, the search results shown below may not be accurate. If you need to find a page and the link isn't accurate, please complete the broken link report and include your email address so that we can send the correct link to you. Thank you for your patience.

That's right, they blamed Google. This wasn't Google's fault; it was the City's. Broken links aren't an act of God. They are due to human error. Sure, Google may have let the City down, but the City took this risk and did not mitigate it.  They made their problem with Google our problem. They broke their implicit promise to the public. Not only did they schedule their website conversion at a critically inconvenient time, they passed the buck when it failed. It is like NASA blaming Morton Thiokol for the Challenger Space Shuttle Disaster (Remember the infamous O-Ring?) Broken links peppered the City's website for the next several weeks, and they haven't all been fixed, even as of this date.

The City's problems with its microphones and website conversions are indicative of a more serious problem: a lack of commitment. No one at the City has promised, "These microphones will not fail, not on my watch." No one has said, "There will be no broken links on our new website, if I have anything to say about it."

So what has this all got to do with sewers? The City of Shoreline, who cannot commit to managing even the simplest of technical systems, now wants to take over your sewers, saying they can do a better job.

Ronald Wastewater District has operated your sanitary sewer system for nearly six decades, flawlessly  and inexpensively. They stake their whole reputation on it, because sewer management is all they do. That is commitment.

Unless you call for an election on the matter, the City will take over the Ronald Wastewater District in 2017. After that, should your sewers fail, you can be sure the City "will be keeping a close watch."