I’ve been writing about my recent visit to Bellevue’s Neighborhood Enhancement Program, where a good natured bureaucrat explained how the residents of my sub-division of Bellevue, Washington are going to be voting on three projects (out of a possible thirteen) that will receive $275,000 of funding from the city with minimal red tape.

One of the projects jumped out at me as something that we absolutely must do. I didn’t even look at the cost or where the work was being done. If you go here, you can see the list of all possible projects. The one I believe in so strongly is described here:

SE-1   Horizon East Asphalt Path and Concrete Stairs
Repave the existing five-foot asphalt path and rebuild the concrete stairs that connect 165th Place Southeast and 166th Avenue Southeast. This would include one streetlight at base of stairs.
Estimated Cost:  $110,000
Project Manager: xyz, 425-xyz-xyzw

The text doesn’t seem to jump out over the twelve other projects, does it? Now imagine if you have a large poster board with a picture of the below staring at you showing the path as it is now. Since the poster board was large and there were only a few additional details to the side (such as a map of where work would be done and some additional text), a picture of the steps below took up a few square feet.

If you’re wondering, this isn’t on some crappy trail where the alternative would be a dirt hill, but is in the middle of a nice residential neighborhood. It looked even worse in the picture they had.

Moral #1: When you have a killer image like this, let it do the talking. Don’t overwhelm it with random statistics, maps, philosophical arguments, etc. Just blow the picture up big while you shut up. The woman pressing for this was also at the NEP Meeting, but she didn’t have to be for my vote.

Moral #2: The only thing better than a picture is going there. I drove to the site to take the above picture and will testify that it’s even worse than it looks. Some of the planks even felt like they’d give way on me. I walked up the steps and took some pictures looking down too and was quite happy when I was off this thing.

Moral #3: If you have the killer image, get a killer camera. I have a low end 6 megapixel camera and I compressed the picture like crazy to save download times for the blog. Whoever took the initial picture had a better camera, since the picture looked really good when blown up on the sheet.

Moral #4: Democracy is far from perfect. Had I not been one of the twenty three attending the NEP program, I would never have voted yes on this project because I would not have imagined the walk being so dilapidated. I seriously doubt this one will pass. In the spirit of bashing Democracy, it’s too bad the other four thousand people in my neighborhood have their votes count the same as mine.