Not that silly

I was looking around to see what others were saying about Fort Wayne's new anti-annoying-lights measure when I came across this, which I missed the first time around, from the My Hud House blog in August:

Representatives from the City of Fort Wayne, Indiana, today announced their bold initiative to replace all city sidewalks with silly putty within the next two years. This is being touted as another huge step towards making Fort Wayne a truly unique city.

[. . .]

Although one would naturally expect this multi-billion dollar project to have to pass through the state's newly enacted referendum law for public projects, that point has been ruled moot. The sidewalk replacement project is being broken up into 35,782,367 individual works, each costing only a little over $1,000.

It captures all too well the way things seem to go here sometimes, including a council member lamenting the lack of public disengagement -- after all, people are allowed to comment after the issue has been decided!