While this recent event in San Francisco, where one government employee held the city’s network hostage for several days, because the city had chosen to have in-house expertise rather than consult it out to a private firm with built in redundancy, may not bear that much resemblance to the failure of government management of one of our precious resources, the American River Parkway, it may raise questions, good questions.
Some things are just done better by private organizations, whether it is building freeways fast, like just happened with the big fix, or contracting with a nonprofit organization to manage a large urban park successfully, as is being done by the Central Park Conservancy which manages Central Park in New York—and raise’s 85% of the funding needed by Central Park.
It is how we would like to see our Parkway managed, which hasn’t met its funding needs for years and has been running about $1.2 million a year behind—just in basic maintenance—for several years.
