‘Free Solutions’

Remember the city in Maine with the ‘pretend beaver deceiver’? Well a beaver friend writes this morning that he called to talk about a more realistic installation and was told by the deputy director of public works that the beavers were already dead. Turns out there’s a trapper on staff so killing them was a ‘free solution‘. No fancy humane interventions needed, we have everything under control.

How sad and stupid and utterly disappointing. Lets hope they got all of them, and that there aren’t some kits shivering in the lodge and slowly starving to death.

Moving right along through the Kubler-Ross stages of beaver grief lets get to anger. Free solution? Maybe. But if it was such a great free idea why didn’t you employ it earlier? The T junction of pipe was useless but not free. Moving it to the other side of the culvert was useless, but not free. Ramming the culvert with a telephone poll was useless but not free. Bringing out the back hoes time after time was useless and not free. All those hours of public works time, when they weren’t filling pot holes or cleaning drains, were paid for with taxpayer dollars and were useless but not free.

If you had a free solution all along, lurking in your back pocket, why didn’t you use it earlier? Say the moment you started to realize there was a problem?

Oh wait, I know why.

You needed cover for your enormously unpopular decision to kill the beavers. Social cover. Ass cover. The ‘we’ve tried everything’ cover. The paper gave you help in this and dutifully printed your painstaking solutions without ever reporting how patently inane they were. You were given a public opportunity to show your citizens you tried and tried and couldn’t solve these problems humanely. You made a public argument that you had no choice, and no one contested it. You had to kill them.

It’s this deception, this dedicated deceit of public opinion, that angers me even more than the actual trapping. You extirpated the public trust and made a mockery of civic involvement. You snared the good will of Lewiston and crushed it in your conibear traps. You used your residents against each other to push public opinion get exactly where you wanted it all along and your local paper faithfully carried water for you. Sure, some beavers died in the process, valuable wetlands were destroyed and countless species will suffer as a result, but that is hardly the real story. Lewiston used kabuki theatre and taxpayer dollars to pretend to solve a problem humanely they had no intention of solving at all.

Take this as a lesson, Lewiston homeowners and taxpayers. The next time your city tells you they are trying to ‘solve’ a problem – traffic congestion, sewers, crossing guards, school funding. Remember that in the back of their minds they may hide the real solution, and all their flailing efforts in the meantime are just trying to drive public opinion in its direction. The city of Martinez has learned with painful clarity that lying about beavers is just the beginning.

Maybe some letters from the public will remind them that ‘free solutions‘ aren’t always free.