I went to a town hall style meeting yesterday regarding whether the city the will charge a fee for entrance to the Strybing Arboretum in Golden Gate park. The speakers were the usual players. The representatives of the park were lamenting sopmething needed to be done to offset the impending budget cuts and the local residents were blasting back with charges of destroying the neighborhood's quality of life.
I tend to agree with the populi one this one – charging for the arborateum will impact the quality of life around here. But that is not why I am writing about this issue. I am writing because of the rational for charging a fee.
According to the city budget the Arboretum is part of Golden Gate Park so it is not in danger of closing. This initiative to charge comes from the desire to develop a new revene stream for the park.
This is city hall implementing an idea that on first pass seems reasonable, but if one digs a little deeper it really turns out to be a bad idea.
In the case of the Arboretum it's a bad idea because it the entrance fee imposes a bigger inconvinience than the benefits of whatever revenue it brings in.
It’s the symptom of something I call the picking the most obvious wrong answer. By this I mean the tendency, when faced with a crisis, to pick the most obvious solution without digging deeper into the pool of possibilities. Decisions are made without regard to anything outside of the immediate need. This tendency creates a sort of arbitary political landscape.
It creates a series ill-fitting decisions that have a hard time working in concert with each other. It would be like a landscape were everything was planted without regard to the garden as a whole. Trees would block the sun of flowers, the root systems of one plant would choke another and then someone plants kadzu.
Updated: 20June2012
