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water-rights · district-hearing · rationing · ledger
Three cities are asking in public what I have been asking alone in a basement — right or rental. My hearing is the evening of the fourteenth. Here is what I will ask for and what I already know I will not get
SR
standpipe_raniOP2124-08-07
a councillor in singapore opened a session this week by saying they built the machine before deciding whose machine it was, and that it was defensible during a crisis and is not a permanent constitution. i read that standing up, at five in the morning, with the queue already forming outside. i have been saying a worse version of that sentence in a basement room with eleven folding chairs for two years and it has never once been reported, and now three megacities are saying it into microphones and i find i am not bitter about that, i am relieved, because it means the words exist now and i can borrow them. so: my hearing is the fourteenth, six thirty in the evening, the district annex. public gallery, anybody can sit in it. here is exactly what i am asking for, so that you can all check afterwards whether i got it. one, the last-mile distribution line for ward 12 appropriated with a commencement date and a named cost centre, not carried as intent. that line exists in the budget and has been rolled forward three cycles while the barrier overrun was topped up, and rolled forward is a decision taken three times and dressed as a schedule. two, the overnight hours restored at the west-side refuge, which were cut in june for budget, which means the people who need the dark hours to cool down lost the cooled building at exactly the hour the walls start handing the day back. three, junior's block added to the priority sheet, because it meets the criteria and was never listed and nobody can tell me who compiled the list. and here is what i already know. i will get two and three. two is cheap and it is the kind of thing an allocations officer can grant in a room and look generous doing it. i will not get one with a date on it, because ostrand in allocations has moved that line three times and a fourth is easier than a fight, and small o is deliberate and he knows it is. i am posting the asks in advance so that when he gives me two and three and calls it a productive session, everybody here can see the shape of what a productive session looks like from the inside.
TO
tidewrench_oksana ↩ standpipe_rani2124-08-07
standpipe_rani, take this exactly as written, because I have won this fight twice in Rotterdam and lost it four times, and the difference was the wording every single time. Do not ask them to fund the line. Ask them to state, on the record, the cost centre against which it is appropriated, the commencement date, and the officer who holds the delegation to authorise the first drawdown. Three nouns, all of them boring, all of them minutable. If any one of the three is missing, what you have is an intention, and an intention survives a fiscal close by evaporating. Second thing and it is the one people always skip: ask what happens to the appropriation if the barrier overrun recurs. In our system the answer is that a maintenance line is legally subordinate to a capital overrun, which means my culvert has been eaten four times by a project that had a ribbon and a photograph. If your line is subordinate, get it said out loud in a minuted room. Third: get the answer in the minutes, not in a letter afterwards. Letters are written by people who have had time to think. Minutes are written by a clerk in the room, and a clerk will write down what was actually said, which is the only reason committees fear them. And rani — commencement dates that fall after a fiscal close are the oldest trick in the book. If they hand you a date, look at where it sits relative to their year-end before you thank anybody.
SR
standpipe_raniOP ↩ tidewrench_oksana2124-08-07
oksana, that is going in the folder tonight, all three nouns and the subordination question, and the fiscal close point is one i would have walked straight past. junior, work clothes are the correct clothes and ten minutes late is fine, the first twenty minutes is procedural anyway. ekene — i do not know. i will think about it and i will not pretend to you that i have. what i will say is that i have prepared for the loss for so long that i have made it into a method, and a method is comfortable, and you have just made me notice that.
DJ
deltaboy_junior ↩ standpipe_rani2124-08-07
i can come. off the port at six, hearing is six thirty, i will be late maybe ten minutes and i will be in work clothes, hope that is ok. i have the block id and the tap schedule and the marker photo of the stairwell. rani if they ask me something i will say it short, i am not good at long. also thank you for putting my block as number three and not as a story.
GP
gridghost_paxmoderator ↩ standpipe_rani2124-08-07
Mod, with the reason stated as always: this thread stays open through the fourteenth and I will be reading it closely, and there is one line I will enforce. Named officials in their official capacity, their decisions and their public record are fair game and always have been on this board. Their home districts, their families, their photographs and their personal details are not, and I will remove those without discussion because a thread that gets somebody's front door talked about is a thread that gets somebody hurt, and it also hands the other side a reason to close the gallery to the public. rani has posted three asks in advance, which is the most checkable thing anyone has done here in a month, and I would rather this board be the place where that gets audited than the place where it gets avenged. — pax, mod. As a resident rather than a moderator: three cities opened hearings on this in the same week and my own council is not one of them, and I notice I am a little envious of a woman with eleven folding chairs.
LE
lastpew_ekene ↩ standpipe_rani2124-08-07
standpipe_rani, one question and then I will stay out of the procedure, which is not my trade. You wrote that you already know you will not get the first ask. How are you sleeping in the week before you go and lose it on purpose? I mean that as a practical question, not a soft one. I have watched a great many people prepare for a room where they expect to be disappointed, and there are two ways to do it. One is to go in already braced, which protects you and also, I have noticed, makes you slightly worse in the room — the bracing shows, and the people across the table read it as a woman who has already conceded. The other is to go in genuinely open to being surprised, which costs more if they do what you expect. I do not know which is right for you. I do know that you have carried this since 2110 and that you have never once, in any thread here, described what you would do if you actually won. That is not a criticism. It is just something I would want to have thought about before the fourteenth, because rooms sometimes turn, and a person who has only prepared for the loss can miss the moment.