Seattle Parks has over the years accumulated a group of employees with the wrong attitude about their jobs. It is time to weed them out. Parks are for us, all of us, and turning off things that are popular with various segments of the public is exactly the opposite of what a public parks department should be doing. (“Parks to homeless: Plug in somewhere else,” RC, Aug. 8, 2012)
Power costs less than eight cents per kilowatt hour and individual users just can’t take enough power from a convenience outlet in a park for the cost of that power to amount to much. Today the ability to connect to Wi-Fi and to recharge cell phone devices are life safety issues.
[Parks department employees] could remember to turn down the thermostat after hours at their offices, they could minimize useless driving around in park department vehicles and shorten their junkets to faraway conventions in fancy destination resort locations. They could make sure they are personally working efficiently, and they could make an effort to reduce the number of pens they take home from the Parks office supply room for their kids to use on their homework.
I would not mind that kind of effort toward economy, but cutting off the public from a convenience outlet here and there in the parks is a stupid, stingy and unsafe denial of an essential public service to the very people who are paying for the parks and paying for them to keep things working in the parks. Whoever is responsible for locking the public out of our outlets in the parks needs to be out-placed into a job in the private sector; they just don’t understand the meaning of public service.
George Robertson | Seattle