Giving councillors net connections is a waste of cash

SAN ANTONIO City Council is discovering that if you give councillors an internet connection they will spend all their time surfing for things like pictures of cheerleaders.

The council, with a budget of $1.8 billion, stuck a computer in front of every councillor so that they could be used to gather information during meetings.

However a telly hack, Brian Collister, pulled the internet logs for these computers and found that the honourable members were not using it for anything so useful. During crucial meetings they were using them to shop online, plan their holidays and, in one case, look at pictures of cheerleaders.

The council is in the middle of a fairly controversial hearing over plans to develop the city's main plaza. Collister has proved that while councillors were supposed to be listening to people for and against the plan, they were in fact reading the news or shopping.

In other words they had made up their mind to vote for the project already and were just going through the motions.

This will come as no surprise for those of us who have sat through council meetings throughout the world, but one wonders which bright spark gave them the tools to do something else while ignoring the views of voters.

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