Consultants need to promote!

I am beginning to find out that consultants have an inherent inability to promote for future work. Perhaps they get contracts by out bidding their competition and playing inside man. Either way, they don’t seem to understand how to sell their work to the recipient, the citizen. Tetra Tech Rizzo stuffed the waterfront park with disneyland features and then tried to sell this highly unrealistic scenario to a public that just wanted a ‘park’. The more goodies they stuffed into it, the more they get paid. The Senior Center consultants created a palace instead of a place just so they could charge the maximum price. Future work prospect for these groups? No, thanks; you’re workups don’t work!

And now the Parking Hearing last night was the same thing. After a third of the citizens had left, we find out amazing things such as most of the money for construction will probably be coming the same way the money for the Clipper City Rail Trail came, the Feds with a little from the State. Now, wouldn’t that have helped the argument from the beginning? People were picturing bonding and debt exclusions in their future. Then, we find out the MVTA will be running the garage! Nice to have known that at the beginning!!! All we saw from their talk and pictures were diesel fumes!

TO SELL THE GARAGE, they could have hired an architect for a few hundred bucks to draw after consulting with the Historical Commission; a beautiful and accurate picture of a garage that BLENDS into the historic downtown. They did none of those things.

If Ed Cameron with the distant help of Jim Roy had not set the tempo for the night, the cameraman from Portmedia would have had to use his body to shield the camera from the rocks and rotten tomoatoes. I mean I saw palpable fear in the eyes of some of the city councilors who were there that night.

If we must go through these long processes that require consultants, let’s hire some not as the lowest cost bidder but ones that know how to sell their concepts.

-P. Preservationist