BROWN FARM FIASCO (cont.): LAS CRUCES BUILDING STORM DRAIN TO POUR MONEY DOWN

My previous blog about the Brown Farm Fiasco indicated three options in response to the failure of Public Works (PW).

Option One: do nothing (= admission of abject failure)—unlikely because the mess is so large, the cost so great, the eyesore so public, and the problem still unsolved.  Options Two: patch and scratch—unlikely although easy and inexpensive to do with a little gully filling, site re-grading, seeding, and face-saving because it pretends that PW got it almost right the first time.  Problem: ineffective after the first big rain, with no grass now and none surviving later, much less slowing the flow, without constant watering, and ATV tracks making new erosion pathways.  Option Three: buffer the three stormwater surges as they enter the site and funnel them by rock channel or sewer pipe to the destination pond, regrade and deep-contour-plow the site to absorb or hold on-site rainfall, and let nature seed the site.  Problem: more expensive though effective, and a non-PW idea.

A neighborhood rumor, which I discuss as if true, greeted me on my return from a one-night trip out of town.  The PW decision is none of the above.  Rejecting Options One and Two is easy to understand for the reasons given; rejecting Option Three is hard to understand and needs a public explanation in light of PW’s new and different idea, which itself needs a public justification—transparency and accountability in advance.

The rumor: PW’s Option Four: build a storm sewer under the north side of Cedardale Loop, with a drain to catch street run-off before it enters two conduits and a discharge opening cut through a concrete ramp.  Additional grading and channeling would then move the water to the destination pond, unless PW plans to leave the water in a pond below the escarpment in which mosquitos with West Nile Virus can breed—the avoidance of which is the reason for the Brown Farm project in the first place.  Problems aplenty: it is very expensive, destructive of a street and ramp in excellent condition, disruptive of traffic in front of about 18 neighborhood residences, and only partly effective because it does nothing about the stormwater from the third conduit, the one with a run-off large and forceful enough to toss and break an unsecured concrete pad.

From PWs perspective, Option Four has important merits.  It is grand in scale and labor-intensive; it is just the thing to turn a department blunder into a bureaucratic and budgetary triumph, and a morale booster.  Problem: from a public interest perspective—that is, the value of an effective solution at affordable price—Option Four demonstrates that the local tradition of petty politics and petty personalities offer little but ineffective and expensive consequences.  It raids the city’s treasury to cover the incompetence and protect the hurt feelings and dented vanity of PW department and project managers, and engineers.  If City Manager Ifo Pili approves this indulgent boondoggle, we shall know all which we need to know about his management style—not much management, not much style.  And, if City Council allows such an ill-conceived and costly project, its members—Miyagishima, Gandara, Stuve, Vasquez, Bencomo, Sorg, Flores—should be removed from office at the earliest opportunity or, in the case of Vasquez and Sorg, scorned when they depart, for betraying the public interest.

PUBLIC WORKS POURS $500,000 DOWN THE DRAIN

The city-owned floodplain just south of Brown Farm is cursed.  Public Works cannot do any job right on its first or even second try to deal with stormwater run-off.

Under Bob Garza’s management approach, Public Works walked away from two failed projects, left the mess, disregarded the money wasted, and held no one accountable.  By good luck, the two failures were small potatoes: no big jobs, no big budgets, no big and visible effects.  The first failure was its inability to properly dredge two channels in which stormwater flowed downhill, from south to north.  First try, the dredged channels tried to run water uphill; second try, the re-dredged channels still tried to run water uphill; no third try, the city left bad enough alone.  The second failure was its inability to install and secure a concrete pad over a mosquito-breeding splash pool.  Stormwater from the first heavy rain lifted the pad, broke it in half, and shoved one half over the other half.  The city left the pad in two overlapping pieces  Under Garza’s leadership, it was hit-or-miss whether projects would get done right the first time, on budget, and on schedule.

Public Works created a much larger, more destructive, and more expensive failure which will challenge Ifo Pili’s management approach (if he can tear himself away from his assigned priority mission: end poverty in Las Cruces!).  This first of three project phases wants to move stormwater from three large conduits to a holding pond a quarter mile away.  It has graded the site; at the far boundary, it has built five rock breakwaters; and it plans to seed the site with grass to slow stormwater between conduits and breakwaters, and to prevent erosion.  Two weeks ago, the first-phase work was nearly complete, and its $500,000 phase-one budget nearly spent.  The first heavy rain made a mockery of the design.  Stormwater did not flow gently and smoothly, avoided all breakwaters, left them high and dry, and cut deep gullies next to them.  The result: complete failure, environmental degradation, wasted money, and a very visible eyesore.

The question is how does Public Works respond under Pili’s management approach.  Does it walk away from failure or try a fix?  Does the fix involve quick, easy, and cheap tweaking: filling in gullies, regrading part of the site, and planting grass ground cover?  Does it believe that stormwater which can lift and break a concrete pad will not rip its way through disturbed soil, however hard-packed?  Does it believe that even drought- and heat-resistant grass (ornamentals? artificial turf?) can survive an almost total lack of water and triple-digit temperatures for many months before the “monsoon season,” and still slow stormwater?  Does it think that the site would not need regular and occasional maintenance?  This approach appeals to Public Works; it sticks with the design to imply near success on its first try.  But, when stormwater surges onto the site, will this fix work?

Public Works knows of at least one other design alternative.  It uses rock barriers to break the force of the stormwater where it leaves the three conduits.  It uses those barriers to funnel stormwater to the head of a long, straight, rock-lined channel to the destination pond.  It uses the rocks from the five useless breakwaters to build the barriers and line the channel.  It uses native vegetation to prevent wind erosion and reduce rainwater erosion.  It requires little maintenance.  But it is more expensive.

Public Works is embarrassed by this monument to incompetence.  It approved the consultant’s design without seeking alternative designs, and analyzing and evaluating them in a this-way-or-no-way decision-making process.  The city does not need another monument, one to the results of a face-saving, hurry-up-and-waste, price-of-everything-value-of-nothing decision to tweak a failure.  In deciding which alternative offers the better chance of success at a reasonable cost, it needs to consider the consequences and costs of failure.  A second failure would be a [fill in the blank].  Still, Pili’s management approach, with City Council’s acquiescence, may be to shrug off the waste of a half-million-dollars and walk away from a site which seems cursed.

RUMBLES AND GRUMBLES

[Note: This blog is today's letter to a dear friend from high school, a women of intelligence and talent recognized for her fine children's books.  Because she liked it, I though to share it with my readers.]

Dear Jeanie,

Why do I pick on you with this letter of woes?  Because you are the one person whom I know who cares deeply about the same issues which I do, though we sometimes disagree.

I now have a sense of impending doom.  Twenty years and a trillion dollars and hundreds of thousands of deaths later, and the Taliban takes over the country in less than a month.  Those who fought and died or were maimed in Vietnam did so in vain, not only in these direct effects, but also in the failure of the country to learn anything.  Today’s generals and admirals did not fight in Vietnam, but their teachers at the military academies did; those teachers either learned nothing themselves or did not teach it, or, if they did teach it, their students did not learn it.  And the same is true of all those political science majors.  The bitter irony about Afghanistan is that while we, in our hubris, sought to extend democracy abroad, we, in our hatreds, ignored its erosion at home.  How long will it be before Republicans reveal their affinities with the Taliban?

As a former military intelligence officer—ignore the oxymoronic phrase—I have to credit the CIA with yet another major failure.  I remember with a certain wryness the fall of the USSR.  A friend of mine was the chief of the CIA’s Soviet and Eastern European desk.  As the collapse began, I ran into him and jokingly asked him what he knew that I did not.  He laughed and said that I probably knew more than he did.  I sometimes think that I may have.  The problem is that the CIA is all about toys for boys; they sit at computer consoles and do their work as if they are playing video games although satellite and sensor technologies can tell us little important, and nothing important about the cultural and morale factors which play such a large role in third-world insurgencies.  Instead, they should be following the example of Mossad, the best because most HUMINT-reliant intelligence service in the world.  You certainly have noticed that Israel can target the apartments, not just the building, of Hamas leaders; they have Palestinian agents on the payroll.

And climate change, for all the talk of slowing and stopping it, is proceeding logarithmically.  I remember talking to my son, a geologist, also a naturalist, perhaps ten years ago about the recurrent underestimates by climatologists in the previous thirty years.  My question was whether the underestimates reflected a systematic but unperceived bias in modeling or the reluctance of scientists to declare the true state of affairs at the risk of their credibility for being perceived as alarmists.

Meanwhile, science in a rush, as the pandemic requires a hurried response, is losing ground to troglodytes, who have a suicidal anti-science agenda.  What they call mandates as government overreach in matters of covid-19, they ignore when it comes to shots for chicken pox and measles, seat-belts, drivers licenses, et alii.  We have so dehumanized ourselves that individuals are willing to ignore the usual instinct for self-preservation for the sake of making themselves a living-breathing political statement—madness on a mass scale.

And the new anti-racism is itself racist.  I just heard from a previous Shaker Heights school board member and chair, and now City Council member, that the SHSS is eliminating all the academic enrichment or advanced programs because they have continued to reflect differences in racial participation.  In the name of racial equality, the effort to raise those who suffer the consequences of weak socio-economic and educational backgrounds is being abandoned to achieve equality by eliminating opportunities for the talented as well as the advantaged.  In other words, the new anti-racists are admitting that they cannot figures out ways to close the gaps and are implying that those for whom they are trying to engineer equality are just not up to it.  Oregon has just declared that it will not use proficiency tests for the next three years.  In all likelihood, they will not return.  The absence of academic standards will do nothing for education, less for employment, either in or out of state, as employers come to suspect the competencies of Oregon job applicants, and nothing for self-knowledge.

All of this grumble and rumble reduces itself to a single thesis: no longer is American the “can-do” country.  Today, American cannot do, and I see no way for it to reverse itself.  As a new anti-racism movement shows, even the Left is imbued with ill-conceived, not to say irrational, approaches to serious problems.  And both sides, the farther one goes to extremes, become more like each other.  I have always thought of myself as a “radical moderate,” that is, fundamentally committed to the basic principles of democracy and fair play.  I have an eight-word code of conduct which I try with great determination to live by: seek truth, do right, demand justice, pursue peace.  Understandably, lots of people find me more than a little bit discomforting.

Of course, I must grumble.  In a few weeks, a gutter collapsed, a toilet bowl malfunctioned, smoke detectors have erupted at all hours (the first one at 4:50 am last Sunday), and my air conditioner died.  The latter disaster was difficult.  It took over two weeks to find, price, and install a new system, when outside temperatures were triple-digit and inside temperatures were in the mid to upper eighties.  When the outside temperature got down to 90, I opened all the doors in a trade-off of higher temperatures for drier air; the humidity build-up from me, four dogs, and two cats was stultifying.

My mother tells the story of the day she found me sitting on the floor in my bedroom and snuffling in sadness.  When she asked me about it, I said that I was “sunk in my own despair”—a line right out of Little Toot!  (She should have known that I would become an English major.)  But that is pretty much how I feel about the state of the world today.  If there is a light at the end of the tunnel, it is an approaching train.

Love,

Michael