BCOS, Another Pet Project

Once again local citizens are punished with yet another unrelated diatribe from one of our elected city officials. Dave Rollo, a Bloomington City Council Member decided to take advantage of the crowded City Council chamber last week when the Living Wage Ordinance was up for a vote. Rather than confining his remarks to matters on the agenda Rollo went into what seemed to be an hour long rant on the status of the worlds oil production, depletion, exploration and exploitation. If that wasn’t bad enough he sent his narrative to the Herald Times and they printed it as a Guest Column. In it he describes another pet project of the City Council called the Bloomington Commission on Sustainability or (BCOS) that is reportedly up for a vote sometime in April. This commission is described as working on the subject of “peak oil” and working toward adapting our community to a post-peak petroleum world.

I don’t know about you but I really wish our City Council would put half as much time in managing the affairs of our city as they do in attempting to solving the world’s problems. Peak oil is so far down the list of important issues that face our city right now it should be a serious concern when they waste time discussing such matters and slight more important topics. When our city is neck deep in red ink and we have a utilities department that can’t calculate a flow rate or manage a budget, it would certainly seem more prudent if they spent their time finding resolution to these issues before running off on some other tangent. Why do they continually seek out the obscure when the obvious stares them in the face? Maybe it’s just me but I thought we elected them to represent us on the City Council not in the House of Representatives. If I could offer them a suggestion it would be, if their passion is for issues of a global nature run for an office that could actually have an impact on those issues and leave the city council seats to someone who can focus on the needs of our community. One by one the members of the democrat-controlled council take their turn at pushing their social agendas through the City Council, each one with its own burden on the budget. Most of these new projects require addition administration and overhead, something that most of them don’t understand or simply don’t care. After all its just tax dollars, something they seem to have no problem extracting more and more of from this community. Along with discussing the worlds shrinking oil supply I wish they would discuss ways to shrink local government to reduce their dependence on our tax dollars, an issue we could all support.