Editor's Note: A satirical argument for the company town.
You may have read recently that there is a wide assumption in Santa Clara political circles that the San Francisco 49ers are hoping to recruit a slate of sympathetic candidates to run for the City Council. As one of the most significant employers in town, the team hasn't really denied the reports.
Woeful as the players have been on the field, the Niners may be onto something profound. They just don't go far enough.
Why not drop the pretense and let corporate interests run our cities? Put another way, it's time to bring back the company town. It will make things far more efficient.
The first task in this badly needed makeover is changing the names. Santa Clara? The current name is probably a violation of church and state to begin with. Why not rename it Ninerdom. Mountain View? Who can see the mountains, anyway? Change it to Googleville.
Cupertino? Just make it Apple Town. Los Gatos? In honor of Netflix, call it Stream City. And Menlo Park? Now that Facebook has moved in, make it the warm and fuzzy "Friendvale.''
REBRANDING
Frankly, I see a lot of branding opportunities here. "Cupertino," for instance, traces its current name to a saint who came from the Italian town of Copertino. Does anyone know that? Of course not. But everyone knows Apple, one of the most famous companies in the world.
It's when you merge corporations with local government, however, that you see the real advantages of my plan.
We've all known for a while that Facebook and Google run a far more efficient transit system than our VTA. Once the companies run local parks, police and planning departments, the long waits we complain about will diminish.
Consider what this would mean for the average city council. Instead of tedious and expensive elections that make politicians captive to special interests, we can appoint representatives from corporate HR, marketing, engineering, finance and administration. The robustness of council debate won't suffer: God knows marketing and engineering already disagree.
EFFICIENCIES
In this new world, silly battles with NIMBY neighbors over projects like the "Grove," Neflix's expansion in Los Gatos -- excuse me, Stream City -- would come to a swift end.
Netflix's corporate leadership could simply decree that a building would happen. No more moaning about traffic. To deal with dissenters, it could call out the cops, who would get stock options and free subscriptions to work for the company.
Those fights about whether an official has a conflict of interest? A quaint thing of the past. There will be no conflicts. There's only one interest -- the corporation's.
Sure, I know there will be some doubters, some lily-livered ACLU types who resist change. Someone might suggest Apple Town would trample privacy in the interest, say, of collecting taxes. Someone else might say that Googleville would know too much about its residents.
But as long as this is done efficiently, people will forgive. My idea takes the concept of government "working at the speed of business" to its logical end.
To paraphrase Calvin Coolidge, government is business. And business is government. Let's play ball.
Source: San Jose Mercury News, Scott Herhold
http://www.mercurynews.com/scott-herhold/ci_30140154/cupertino-nah-its-apple-town
