In praise of the boring parts

There is a particular type of geek whose passion — whose source of geekiness — is local governance.

He or she can be found attending borough assembly and city council meetings. They’re the type who get up to testify as a “concerned citizen” or who commend their assembly members for things like planning and good public relations.

We know this type of geek exists, mostly because we are those people.

But no matter how governance geeky you are, there are parts of even the most controversial, debate-heavy assembly meeting that make your eyes glaze over. There’s no shame in it. These meetings can get quite quotidian.

And they were never more quotidian than Tuesday when Jim Colver chose to seek changes to the borough’s plans for how to restructure its pool use fees.

You see, borough administration wanted to do away with the punch cards by which a user can buy 10 pool visits for the price of eight.

The pools are money losers — “heavily subsidized” in the words of the borough — so it just seemed to make sense when looking for ways to ameliorate those costs to do away with that 20 percent discount. Staff estimates put the number of punch cards sold each year at 1,000. The cost for them is something on the order of $50 each. That means the borough would, in theory at least, pull in an extra $10,000 a year for its pools if it forced users into some other kind of option to pay for admission.

But Colver didn’t like it. Cards are convenient, he said.

“It takes less labor to not have to exchange (money) every time somebody shows up,” Colver said.

It’s also more convenient for pool users to pay once instead of remembering to bring money each time.

Staff argued that the pool is trying to convert to monthly passes instead of punchcards. Punch cards, after all, are good in perpetuity. Memberships expire and have to be renewed.

Colver pointed out that punch cards can go through the wash or get ripped up or lost. They aren’t really good forever.

Eventually, he won the day by eliminating the discount. Someone can still buy a 10-visit card, but only by paying for 10 visits instead of eight. This victory, as always, didn’t come before one of Colver’s colleagues griped that he was “micromanaging” and another that he didn’t have enough information to vote and thus wanted a staff report and a delay to a subsequent meeting.

We bring this up in excruciating detail mostly to make a point — this is what governing looks like.

We sometimes get starry-eyed over pie-in-the-sky dreams and large, sexy projects. We may become upset and engage in finger pointing and chants of “I told you so!” when our predictions prove true.

But day-to-day governing is not about big things ferries and bridges and prisons, it’s about smaller things like swim passes and wheel chair ramps and ventilation systems.

Well, it’s about all of these things, really. But it’s the small things like swim passes that impact most of us day-to-day. It seems safe to say that more people will complain about this tiny rate hike at the pools than will ever ride the M/V Susitna while the borough still holds title.

We hope you’ll join us the next time a meeting delves into such arcane, inane details — scratch the sleep from your eyes, sit up a little straighter and lean in to catch the small details that make a difference in the quality of all our lives.