“After all, we live in a time awash in numbers, facts, data, and big companies to crunch all that data.”

And, many like cherry picking that data for possible agenda postings, to the point of info-spam?

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Due to also living in a mid-sized midwestern city, reading this piece I happen to know e-x-a-c-t-l-y what you are writing about. So yeah, most enjoyable and understandable for me.

Another way I see this story is, if a city is rich enough then the city government has enough perceived wealth to form a million dollar task force to study the best way to form other task forces, in effect task force management as a government function.

You may see some truth to these kinds of behaviors annually when receiving increases in joys like the water-sewer bills, telecommunication excise taxes, the annual elephant of property tax increases, the randomly applied annual property assessments, assorted annual user fees for stuff like enabling bike path usage, and I’m sure there is a wealth of items I left out, but I’m just noting the highlights. Or, how to tell when you live in a pricy metro.

Granted bigger cities have bigger obstacles to wealth enhancement for the citizens so of course one of their side-effects is just plain more overt corruption, but I’d like to think that living in the mid-size city as I do it’s more like a kinder gentler legal corruption, as if out of sight. :-)