Could Do Better

The council are upgrading a local playpark and lots of local people seem unhappy about it. Our local council is the City of Edinburgh, but is that local enough? It might seem unrelated but maybe it isn't. The centralised nature of Scottish government sees Holyrood jealously guarding its powers to keep local government in check - motive unclear but depending on where you sit on THE issue of Scottish politics either to prevent wasteful expenditure by political opponents or systematically weaken the delivery of many of the services that directly impact people's lives in order to boost the case for independence. However, local government itself is also ridiculously centralised with the lowest number of councillors per head in the developed world. Which means that the councillors there are are overworked and unable to pay enough attention to local matters, such as the refurbishment of a play park. As I understand it the park equipment, which was showing its age at something like twenty years since the last overhaul, has been replaced with things that are designed for the youngest children, with nothing challenging enough for their older siblings. Worse still, there is no recognition of the need for accessible equipment. Not something that was considered decades ago but now very possible to implement. Which all seems like an opportunity missed. No one seems to have asked the users of the park what they would like and then investigated what could be done within the budget. Perhaps there could have been local efforts to raise funds to supplement the budget. And will the lessons be learned for the next play park in the city? The trouble with these things is that the bureaucracy that manages it all rolls on and those impacted are badly served but are then unlikely to see the benefit of any changes to the process. It's like poorly designed systems in academia. You come across something that is ridiculously complicated and bureaucratic but it maybe effects you once a year for three or four years. Things move so slowly that there isn't much chance of it getting sorted before you graduate, and making waves in the institution may distract you from your studies. So you leave it and the system continues, working for the benefit of those running it and not those using it.
 
I recognise there is a difference between council officials and elected councillors and sometimes those elected are just as powerless as the people who elect them, again in part because of the lack of time to keep across everything they could conceivably get involved with because of the low level of representation. Maybe if we had community councils that had real powers and budgets...