Council hopeful Dave Spackman of Oshawa Canada has chosen a simple, bold platform for his election, (blushing tones not withstanding). “Kill the beavers!” Remember that last year Oshawa citizens were told the beavers were being relocated when they were really being killed. Then this year the residents rallied to save the beavers and stop the council from killing them. A temporary moratorium on killing was issued but the trappers invitation got lost in the mail so some beavers got accidentally killed anyway. All this, (including the council promising they’d ask the trapper if it was the mother beaver that got killed and the trapper telling them it was impossible to sex a beaver so he couldn’t know), sparked a fair amount of outrage and public pressure that motivated the council to rethink. (Note: in this sentence prefix “re” may be an exaggeration.) Now the fine environmental group that recommended killing them in the first place has a contract with the city for 60,000 to maintain the pond at a safe height so the beavers can stay. Dave feels that this exorbitant amount is so unpopular with voters that its worth a slogan and he’s built a campaign around it.
Dave Spackman: Kill the beavers!
At last a politician that will keep his promises! Well, not Dave himself personally. He’ll use taxpayer money of course to hire another trapper and kill the beavers but it will be WAY less than 60,000 dollars. Not sure what else he’d do for the town or where he stands on zoning issues, district funding, property taxes or road maintenance but by golly I know where he stands on beaver issues! Kill them all!
(Pinkly!)
(One has to speculate about the color. Did Mr. Spackman have an earnest kitchen-table conversation with a sensitive aunt or savvy political adviser who told him that the slogan might possibly alienate the female vote? Is the hue intended to ‘soften’ his murderous message and show subconsciously that he means no harm to women in general and is just protecting Oshawa’s purse strings? Or, perhaps, is this a deeply complex, ‘Brokeback Mountain‘ type of trapping advocate, who just happens to be really, really fond of pink? Inquiring minds want to know.)
I thought it was worth writing about Mr. Sparkman not because his platform is unusual, but because its so very, very typical. We here in Martinez have had more than a few politicians and candidates that have carved a name for themselves by being loudly anti-beaver. Especially when public works got finished with their important C.I.R. (Cost-inflating Record). By the time they were done adding up all the police presence they paid for at the November meeting, the hours they spent digging out the dam and the shovels they had to replace when they dropped some in the water, Martinez reported a beaver-saving cost of 75,000.
(For the record, 13,000 of that went towards bringing out Skip Lisle from Vermont to install the flow device at the dam. He flew out twice, one to ‘pitch’ his contraption and once to install it. The city paid for him to stay here in town a couple of days while he saw how his install held up to the first rains. The cost of airfare from Vermont to Toronto is about 350 dollars right now. You could put Skip up in a pretty nice hotel, buy him several of the finest dinners in town and have him install a flow device made of copper and silicon for that price. Just sayin’.)
You see, Oshawa’s 60,000 and Martinez 75,000 (that became 375,000 when they installed the sheetpile) seems like a lot of money, an impossible amount of money, more than any hardworking city can afford to squander to “save some rodents”. But, of course, that’s not what its for. It would only be ‘too much’ if it was for resident’s benefit. These sums of course are for the politico’s benefit – cover money, front money, make-them-look-good-money, lawsuit prevention money, pretend money: so the actual sums don’t matter at all. These are ‘fairy costs’, as in, clap your hands and lets make the voters pay for pretending this job is really, really expensive. If they end up hating all the money we’re spending, we won’t have to spend it, and the problem will go away. If they end up hating the do-gooders in town who are forcing us to spend all that money they’ll bicker amongst themselves forever and we can get back to our rezoning decisions uninterrupted and the problem will go away. If the money turns out to be a waste no one will ever believe those loud mouths again and we’ll get to kill the beavers and the problem will go away. And if it happens that it all turns out to be worth it, well we inflated the costs so its cheaper than it looks anyway. Problem solved!
How can we lose?
Mr. Sprackman doesn’t yet understand the way politics work or his sign
would just read;
