Now I want to be very clear that I support civic participation — I have always supported it, I dragged my cousin Renata to a zoning meeting in 1987 and she has never fully forgiven me, but that is beside the point — so when I say that changing the Public Works Committee meeting to the second and fourth Wednesdays at 4 PM is a decision that was made without consulting the people who actually live here, I mean it in the most constructive possible way. Four o'clock. On a Wednesday. I do not know who is available at four o'clock on a Wednesday but I will tell you it is not anyone who works a shift, drives a child somewhere, or has standing plans, and I have standing plans on the second Wednesday because that is when Margaret and I do our walk and we have done it for eleven years and I am not saying the city scheduled around me personally, but I am not not saying it either.
And another thing — this business about 12 council members across 6 wards, which I have known my whole life, but apparently it is news now, so fine — what I remember is that when they redrew things back in the day, there was a whole to-do about which streets fell into which ward and certain decisions were made that the people on Elm-adjacent blocks are still quietly furious about, and I am not going to relitigate it here except to say that representation only works if the people doing the representing actually hear from the people being represented, which brings me back to the 4 PM Wednesday meeting that half the ward cannot attend. You see how it connects. I did not plan that but there it is.
What I will say about the council structure, since we are talking about it, is that 12 members sounds like a lot until you realize how much ground there is to cover and how many second and fourth Wednesdays there are in a year when you are trying to get a pothole addressed — not that I am bringing up potholes, I am speaking generally about the volume of public works matters that accumulate — and several of those members are starting new terms in January 2026, which means there is a window right now, before January, where the people who actually live here could show up to a Public Works meeting and make an impression, if the meeting were at a time when showing up was possible, which, again, 4 PM on a Wednesday.
That's all for this week. You know where to find me.