By: The Virginian-Pilot
Chesapeake - home of an infamous fly-ash golf course, three unusable jail buildings and other attractions suitable for a Taxpayers for Common Sense bus tour - most decidedly does not suffer from TMI.
But that didn't stop City Council members from complaining at a recent meeting that they'd received too much information about change orders on various city projects.
The 315-page report - the first effort by staff to provide more financial details in the wake of disclosures about runaway taxpayer dollars - was like "drinking water out of a fire hose," according to Vice Mayor John de Triquet.
The tome was "a passive-aggressive attempt to inundate council with undecipherable information," he said, adding: "I personally am affronted by it." Others on the council expressed frustrations with the report, as The Pilot's Marjon Rostami wrote.
The folks at City Hall, already under scrutiny for lax oversight of city projects, certainly didn't do themselves any favors with the document dump.
It would have been better to more carefully distill the information in a shorter report, with additional documents on standby if further questions arose from the council. That's the approach the staff should take in response to the complaints.
But at this stage, council members aren't doing much for their own battered image as fiscal hawks when they cry they can't see the forest for all those pesky trees.
This council, after all, admitted it displayed an astounding lack of curiosity about the jail project as it sank deeper and deeper into a financial morass.
If the official account is to be believed, no one even bothered to ask casually, "So, how are things going with those additions at the jail that cost us $7.2 million? What's that, you say? They're unusable?"
When handed a mound of documents, the council's wisest course - as stewards and as politicians who might want to be re-elected someday - would be to say, "Thank you. More, please."
And to start reading.
Too much info in Chesapeake? No chance of that (Pilot-Online)
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