Brookline’s Buzzword Bingo.
By Jim Conley • Feb 13th, 2008 • Email This Post to a Friend •
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There’s a masterful ad running for IBM where employees sit through an executive presentation and mark off bingo cards with the buzzwords they’re sure to hear [watch the ad above]. I wish I had such a card during last night’s presentation of the Brookline municipal budget.
The big winner in Brookline’s buzzword bingo is sustainability. It’s what town government is all about. What does it mean? Well, I’m guessing it means avoiding the difficult decisions that face our little burg. It means covering the gap between spending and revenue by increasing the property tax.
Then there’s the mythical structural deficit [see previous post]. If you were marking cards with this on it during Deputy Town Administrator Sean Cronin’s ramble over the budget, you’d have gone home with a pocketful of quarters. (Only in Brookline can a structural deficit be reduced by $500 thousand due to a change in the cost of medical premiums. I think that’s called an operating deficit - you know, one that changes as costs or revenue change.)
My God, though, nothing beats the buzzword vocab of Town Administrator Richard Kelliher. He doesn’t analyze, he “crosswalks”. Town departments aren’t reviewed, they’re” X-rayed”. We don’t make cuts in a budget, we “achieve efficiencies”.
Seriously folks, if you’ve ever worked in a place where they play buzzword bingo, you know what it means - the execs have lost their grip on reality.
Bingo.
Jim Conley is publisher of On Brookline.
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