Thursday, November 29, 2007

Done.


Fall Town Meeting is over! I thought for sure we'd have one more session in December, but I was wrong. Thank you, Mr. Moderator, for keeping things moving and wrapping it up!

Overall, my Town Meeting Crystal Ball worked pretty well-- all of the articles that I thought would pass, passed, and all of the articles I thought wouldn't pass didn't. I did get some of the details wrong, though-- we did not see pretty pictures of happy Fair Trade workers at any point during Town Meeting, and I had no idea zoning articles could be broken up into lots of tiny pieces.

I got lots of positive feedback on the Google Earth maps I created to illustrate a couple of the zoning articles (click on the picture in this blog post to see a full-sized version of the College/SouthEast street zoning changes). I like maps; maybe in a future Town Meeting I'll create and show an animated fly-by (maps are even spiffier when they move).

I'll publically post my predictions for Spring Town Meeting before it starts, just because (as I said before) it's fun to pretend to be psychic. Gazing into my crystal ball I see... structural budget deficits... chicken-counting while staring at eggs... Larry Kelley... Vince O'Connor... hard questions about "found" money in the school budgets... pointless debate over the Comprehensive Plan...

At least it won't be so dark and cold; I generally ride my unicycle to Town Meeting, and that's a lot more fun in the Spring.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Your maps were cool - thanks for providing them. Here's a flyby from Stephanie's site.

Mary E.Carey said...

You riding a unicycle to Town Meeting sounds like a good photo op and also fitting

Unknown said...

Excellent maps! I like the idea of a fly through as well. Here's an example of one that we have on the Town website: http://gis.amherstma.gov/3D/video.html