‘Working on it’ yields no answers

The recent letters about the city government’s lack of candor and responsiveness regarding the bricks at the Everett Performing Arts Center certainly matches my experiences with them.

On Jan. 4, 2005, I left a voice message with the city regarding a change to their parking permit policy. The return call said they’d look into it. When I’d call periodically to see how things were going they’d tell me they were “working on it.” Four years later (May 1, 2009) I wrote to the mayor’s office about the delay. No one from his office responded but a representative of the appropriate department called to tell me they were “working on it.” In the years since then I called the department several times, and each time they were still “working on it.” My most recent voicemail to them was Oct. 10 of last year. I am still waiting for a reply. Nearly eight years have passed since I first inquired about the permits. I assume they are still “working on it.”

On Sept. 26 of this year a city bus was extremely late. Everett Transit didn’t have a phone number that allowed the caller to talk with a person, only to machines, and there was no message option, so I called the mayor’s office for help. The person there said she’d find out why it was so late and call me within a few days. Two months later I am still waiting for her call.

Apparently, as seen with the current brick situation, the city government uses stonewalling as a tool to discourage those pesky citizens who seek to “interfere” with what it wants to do. The citizens of Everett are nuisances who are treated genially whenever they succeed in making contact, then safely ignored. I look forward to the next election.

Trygve Anderson

Everett