Is this the city of Boondoggle?

Radio stations are a great means of passing information. But to a great extent the proposal from the mayor and City Council amounts to yet another instance of wanting to apply “yesterday’s technology tomorrow” at considerable waste of money and resources for an extremely questionable gain.

Right off the top, $50,000 for some consultant to do a lot of copy and paste into a document that would be rather quickly relegated to a cardboard box in some back closet in City Hall is patently silly, in my humble opinion.

We have four high schools full of resourceful kids who are the next generation of movers, shakers and doers who could be the driving force behind a much more extensive and inclusive report at no cost, instead, rather a very good lesson for the participants in civics, demographics, citizen involvement, business math, technology utilization, on and on.

Sadly, the Kent School District’s website only lists the total number of students and I found no readily available breakdown of school population by grade. But a quick guess from their numbers indicates that there are about 2,000 senior students in those four high schools. A simple feedback questionnaire distributed to those kids and parents could yield a very extensive poll of the students, their families and neighbors to gather information on the likelihood of their utilizing such a station and the results could be back within two weeks of issue. It could easily collect the demographics of potential users by age, language, length of Kent residency, etc., etc., with only the cost of the paper it is printed upon.

Tabulation and reporting the data should be part of the full assignment and an excellent lesson in real-world use of technology for those students in the Tech academy classes. My slice on the idea is that it is a win for residents in gathering the desired information at minimal cost as well as a win for the students by engaging them in a fairly simple community planning process. In addition, it can be a very good lesson in real-world processes for decision making and cost-benefit analyses in personal, civic or business domains.

On the basic issue of a radio station, my personal opinion is that it is a waste of time and money. It would be a far better use of resources to revise the existing city website to be more user friendly than it currently is. As a comparison, the city of Shoreline website is far more intuitive to use and contains much more usable information than does the Kent website.

Kent’s website has far too much fluff in the way of finding usable information and only leads the user to think that the designer has no feel for how serious users of the website actually utilize the information. That lack only gives the user the feeling that the public is regarded as being “mushrooms” by the powers that be: Keep ’em in the dark and feed ’em compost.

In my opinion, the proposed expenditure of $209,000 plus another $50,000 for a consultant would be far better spent on filling potholes in our streets. Oh, silly me. This proposed radio station could also broadcast pothole alerts as part of the traffic updates. Why didn’t I think of that sooner?

– Paul Nickelson