Letter to the Editor from Donald Weyer:
Everybody has their very own special interest, their little sphere of influence. I'm sure each and every one of them has a claim to legitimacy, an intrinsic value, which we should honor and respect.
- Business owners who must turn a profit, obtain a return on their investment.
- Customers are clients of a business who spend their hard-earned dollars in anticipation of receiving a service, a product, or a cure.
- Civil servants and their managers deliver on a policy, supervise a project, and satisfy their myriad electors, appointees and representatives.
- Even the construction companies paid to innocently put up a building, doing it safely and in the most efficient and cost-effective manner possible. (All four ably reported in coverage by the "Batavian").
All constituencies aim to perform in concert, even though each constituency serves a different master. Don't believe the foregoing? Just look at the eruption of passion that flared up and reached critical mass in Batavia on 4/22/24 when fences sprung up surrounding the construction site for the new City of Batavia Police Department headquarters at that tiny plot of land, late a not very good actually, parking lot bounded by Alva Place, Washington Avenue, and Bank and State Streets!
Alan Iverson, late of the NBA, responded while he was still playing professional basketball to accusations of not giving his all with the words, "I mean practice, that's what it was, practice, really. Not a game. Not the game. We talking about practice, man". Likewise, I counter to this current civil conflagration: "We're talking about fences, and patches of grass, and parking spaces, really, when we're putting up a grand brand new police headquarters?"
I'm no civil engineer, but I think the current problem can be broken down into 3 themes that no one else seems to be thinking about:
- New city construction in a high-density area of population.
- Too many cars on the road in the city.
- And back to the beginning of this piece: numerous and many special interests and spheres of influence. (Heck, my own special interest: I've been fuming for over a year now over the loss of that small section of Main Street sidewalk in front of the construction of the Healthy Living campus! It's an inconvenience, a cancellation of routine, a safety hazard, the necessity for a detour, and generally, a diminution of my valuable time left on this earth to be put to productive use. But I'm getting through it, thanks!)
Incidentally, I'm all for private business, private business customers, the police, the City Manager, the City Council, and new construction. I guess fences, loss of patches of grass, and parking spaces are the costs, the price, of modern progress that we must pay, grin and bear.
