Anyone who knows me knows I have a low opinion of government efficiency, to the point that I’m surprised when an encounter with any government agency goes well. But, being aware of my biases, I recognize that I ought to provide counter-arguments when I find them. And I have one!
Behind our house is a “collector street”, a two-plus-turning-lane road that helps feed traffic to major arterial streets. It is separated from the various neighborhood backyards by a 6-foot cinderblock wall. On our side of the street the wall has been stuccoed over. On the other side it’s bare block. Next to each wall is a sidewalk and a grass strip, with trees planted at intervals. It’s rather nice, as roads go.
Sunday morning, while out walking my dog, I was dismayed to find that taggers had visited our neighborhood during the night. About every 20-30 feet on both sides of the street, in gray or purple spraypaint, they had left their mark on the world.
We live a block from the high school, so I shouldn’t have been surprised. And that probably explains why I didn’t pay more attention when I heard a group of teenagers moving along the street the night before, taking an inordinately long time. I was suspicious enough to look out the window, but when I didn’t see anything (we have several large maple trees screening our house from the road–and vice versa) I left it alone. Lesson learned.
I remembered having heard about a hotline or something being set up to report graffiti, so when I got home I started googling (or binging, in my case) and eventually found an online contact form for reporting graffiti. Now, if there is one thing I have less confidence in than calling and leaving a message on some department’s voice mail, it’s filling out generic contact forms. But I did it, providing as much detail as I could, and submitted it. Though I had included my email address in the requested field, there was no confirmation email.
When I got home from work Monday evening I checked my email, half-expecting to have received some sort of response akin to “Core Control is aware of the problem.” Sure enough, I had an email waiting for me from an unfamiliar name from my city’s domain. It was rather brief: “Thank you for reporting this. I will take care of it today.”
Yeah right.
But on the off chance they were not over-promising and under-delivering, I went to look out my back window. Sure enough, gone. Not just painted over. Gone.
Wow!
I’m not sure how much of my taxes goes to my city government, but that’s one part I’ll be paying with a smile from now on. I expected they might send someone around within a week or two to paint over it in some generic color that would look nearly as bad as the original graffiti. I did not expect next-business-day service and for the tagging to disappear nearly without a trace. Did they hire Harry Potter or something?
So I do have to continue to amend my bias. Not all government is bloated, inefficient, and wasteful. Some of it, at least on the local level, is awesome!
You touch on an important topic here. To many people on the left anyone who advocates for smaller govt must be anti-govt who advocates for anarchy or some distopian mega-corporate control of our lives. I saw an example of that earlier this week with Elizabeth Warren reporting such about one of her colleagues. Govt DOES have a role, and IS needed. It is, however, especially nice when it does it well, instead od what we normally get.