August 27, 2007
Happy 7th Birthday, Christian!
Before I go any further, please change my email address to aander8130@gmail.com ... yes, that's right ... I'm going to finally abandon AOL. And, yes, I can hear some of you saying that it's about time. What can I say. As the Amy Grant song goes "It takes a little while, sometimes, to turn the Titanic around."
Which is a whole 'nother subject. One I'll not explore today.
Tomorrow I head to Jacksonville -- Alabama, not Florida -- for a City Finance Committee Meeting where they will discuss the Utility Department budget. Now, before you yawn and roll your eyes, you need to know that at the last two meetings I've covered, the financial discussion has proven unexpectedly newsworthy. At one, the discussion was on changing banks ... which sounds dull, but when you think of how much money flows through a school system's bank accounts and then imagine that money flowing through another bank's accounts, the meeting transaction suddenly acquires interest ... puns intended. At another, the board spent two hours ... TWO HOURS ... discussing whether to accept a precedent-setting ruling from an administrative judge as to whether a copy machine company should be disqualified from a particular bid. Again, sounds soporific rather than sensational, but we're talking millions of dollars for the contract and somebody's salary somewhere down the line on the line.
All of which to say that the futility of utility is not a given.
Actually, it's part of our first assignment. We're not to actually report on the meeting, but to analyze how the meeting could be reported.
Check out the pictures above to see some of my fellow Fellows. I have another slide show I'll load in soon that was of our trip to Tuscaloosa.
And...last chance to vote on whether to Blog or M'log! (See survey in right hand column)
Anne
No comments:
Post a Comment