The opening line of Mr. William's article on the report of Mayor's Green's Select Committee on Business (Business Committee weighs in on city, The Citizen, Feb. 21) that this group (unsurprisingly) thinks our city needs to "operate like a business" is not a particularly novel outlook.
It dates back well before the heyday of such thinking during the height of the Ronald Reagan era, indeed to the brilliant governance system created and enacted by Albert Speer on behalf of the Third Reich.
That approach was a veritable paragon of public sector efficiency with the inconvenient exception that it presumed a monolithic single purpose for governments in which only some citizens mattered.
Public life, alas, is messier, a jungle of trade-offs and even tragic choices.
Cities are more like ecosystems than corporations if they are to be vital and caring places that work for all citizens.
They do not form and exist to satisfy the dictates of a single "bottom line" but as necessarily chaotic assemblages of all sorts of human beings with diverse arrays of needs and wants. That's what makes them exciting places to be but, yes, hellish tough to run.
It is fine, and, given her background, predictable, for the new mayor to commission a select committee of folks whose proper concern is the business environment end of governance.
That their only recommendation that relates even obliquely to non-buisness issues is to echo our neocon PM's tough on crime rhetoric, likewise is no surprise.
But now, Mayor Green, perhaps you would like to consider establishing some parallel committees that emphasize quite different, but no less important, vantages on the urban challenges that lie ahead - say a Select Committee on Arts and Cultural Life and a Select
Committee on Social Well-being?
Then, and only then, will I be relieved of the uncomfortable feeling that a mayor who came to politics as a businessperson may be a bit confused about the important distinctions between running a successful shop and running a 21st century city.
Norman Dale
Prince George
