Nobody Knows Nothin’

In my ongoing self-enumeration of personal inadequacies, I have finally found solace in a statement made at the latest Vashon Park District (VPD) commissioners meeting last night by zen master Bill Ameling. In truth, I had not come to the meeting for any kind of enlightenment- having come to enough of these meetings I now realize that enlightenment, along with common sense and logic, are not factors that play into the goings on in the bowels of VPD. What I hadn’t suspected, and I thank Mr. Ameling for setting me straight on this, is that having not come to all of the meetings since the District’s inception grants me an exemption from knowing anything about that which I might want expound upon regarding VPD business and operations. If one were to buy into this line of reasoning it could be profoundly cathartic on a number of levels- just think of the freedom that not knowing about anything through default absence could afford. In another sense though, it might leave one with a profound sense of isolation and abandonment, as if one carries this logic out to the extreme it would mean that the only thing anyone anywhere knew about anything would only be that which one knows about oneself, having been with that singular self-sameness and nothing else, at least in theory, from the start.
 
All that being said, I wasn’t quite ready to yield to Mr. Ameling’s sweeping contention that all of us in attendance, including parks director Elaine Ott ("…our executive director has no idea what we are talking about…." said Bill Ameling), were no-eyed waifs living in the land of the blind. What all of this was about was the board’s contention that what we really need to get this park district on track is to hire a $50,000 a year consultant to advise our current maintenance supervisor, Jason Acosta, as to how to be a maintenance supervisor. This seemed kind of odd to me, as having attended almost all of the VPD commissioners meetings for over a year now, Mr. Acosta has always appeared to be well prepared when called upon to answer any maintenance question tossed his way. I have heard him report on fixing problems that for some reason were built into the new construction at the VES fields, and I have heard him praised for how he has made due with the staff cutbacks which were forced by the monetary shortfalls caused by these same fields. So I spent the morning going back through my recordings of many of these meetings and found not only that the problem of the under qualified and problematic maintenance department had not been mentioned prior to this meeting, but also that many of the so-called problems of lack of accountability and performance had never been an issue until this meeting.
 
Somewhere along the way the curious word "need" cropped up in Mr. Ameling’s rhetoric, as in: "… we have a need for professional help and we don’t have it here." This is the same four letter word and four word phrase- we have a need- that served to invite the VES fields project to the VPD house-wrecking party. As of yet I have not seen the quantifiable need presented as a reason for initiating this fields debacle- we have the same number of fields that we started with and a few of them are a little greener and a lot harder and way more expensive to maintain- call me nitpicky but we didn’t really need that. And from an apparent fictional need for the fields to this particular dalliance, one can only infer that this board has learned nothing regarding imagined power and the waste of public tax money. It was mentioned early on in this latest meeting that the executive director was budgeting some education funds for herself in order to better run and understand the district, in spite of the fact that she hasn’t been here from the start. Along the same lines, it would seem a lot cheaper and wiser to invest a fraction that $50K consultant fee on raising Mr. Acosta’s maintenance abilities through his education and edification, rather than wasting it on nepotism and cronyism, as some are rumored to have heard regarding as to where this money is potentially headed. I could save Mr. Ameling the time and breath by telling myself "you don’t know that." I could, but this is, after all, the Vashon Park District.