They Don’t Get It

I suppose a blog post that is due to hit on Christmas Day should have some kind of uplifting message about peace, love and universal brotherhood, and this story might have a bit of that in it somewhere, but I’d forgive you if you don’t see it at first. Because today’s story comes to us from the AP by way of NJ.com, and it’s about how the town of Bridgewater, New Jersey spent $17,000 defending a legal case over a $4.04 refund to one of its citizens – and ultimately lost…

The whole thing began simply enough, as these stories always seem to; a resident of Bridgewater objected to the town charging him $5 for a CD copy of the recording of a town council meeting. Since these meetings are a matter of public record – and since a recording had already been made and was available to anyone who wanted it – the resident thought the service charge was unreasonable. Given the amount of effort it takes to burn a CD copy of a sound file, it’s hard not to agree with him, especially since there is a city agency in Bridgewater that already employs someone to make those copies for anyone who asks. When the town blew off his request, the resident filed a complaint with the New Jersey Government Record Council, and two years later the state council agreed with him and ordered to town to refund the $4.04 for the CD and the $3,500 in legal fees the resident had incurred while pursuing this action…

Now, one could reasonably ask why this guy was being such a tool about this issue in the first place. After all, it’s just a $5 service charge; hardly something worth taking two years and spending $3,500 over, let alone forcing your community to spend another $14,000 of their own legal fees to defend. But when you consider the facts of the case, it rapidly becomes clear that this was exactly the point in the first place – the town had no legal, fiscal or statutory right to just randomly slap service fees on things whenever they wanted to, and when called on it they should just have given the resident his CD and lived with the consequences until they could pass a municipal code mandating the fee. To my mind, however, the most stunning part of this dubious piece of public administration comes at the end of the story, when the Town Attorney claims that the legal fees would have been much lower if the resident had just settled his case…

If that wasn’t snarky enough for you the first time, I’ll do it again: the relevant public official denied responsibility for the outcome of his municipality being called on a blatantly illegal attempt to grab money from its citizens by blaming the resident in our story for not settling on a case which HE WON. It’s a bit like a coach saying “We could have won the game if the other team hadn’t insisted on scoring so many points.” It indicates that the public officials involved had somehow become so certain of their own righteousness that even after losing the case, they STILL don’t realize that the problem is entirely of their own making. Not unlike people who make judgments about people they’ve never met, books they have never read, or religious beliefs they’ve never actually studied…

I don’t know if we can be better than that; I don’t know if humanity can rise above its baser instincts and become all of the things we aspire to be. I just know that if we’re actually going to get there, we’re going to need less of this kind of knee-jerk reaction and more actual thought, self-awareness and reason. This seems like a good day to start working on all of that…

Merry Christmas, everyone!