We’ve been slowly digesting the post-Thanksgiving workshop from Tuesday like leftover turkey and dressing, but a lot less tasty. The overarching theme this week is: if you build houses, you will also need roads for the drivers and schools for the kids living in them. This fact is so glaringly obvious that it is difficult to understand why you would need a very, very long workshop for it, but how else will Billy Shreve attempt to set up a gotcha trap while actually possessing nothing?

Some of our observations include, in no particular order:

Janice Spiegel is exactly as awesome as everyone says she is. She presents an interesting tool for anticipating growth from the known approved housing in the pipeline. In spite of all the hypotheticals, she must reiterate continuously that she has not prepared a budget document, and does not predict a timeline for this. Simply the issue is if you build all those houses, people will live in them, so heads up. It’s a completely new concept for the two critters who helped approve those developments, Aside: when other people see Blaine stuck in all the traffic, are you as tempted as we are to roll down the window and scream at him, “This is your fault, you ridiculous fool! And also, Dog the Bounty Hunter called and he wants his outfit back!”

Tony Chmelik’s questions seem to imply that it is silly to focus on geographic regions. Would he recommend redistricting your kids like Newton’s Cradle every year, any time they could hunt down an empty seat to stick them in, just, “tok-tok-tok, all fixed; we’ll move you back next year when there’s an empty seat here, probably?” Would he send kids from his neighborhood to Libertytown, even knowing they will be stuck on the other side of a truck wedged under the CSX bridge 3 out of every 5 weekdays?

Kirby Delauter can manage to behave himself. It was so weird. Kampaigning Kirby disagrees quite respectfully (until he gets all worked up about Jan Gardner, and then he returns to his ranty man thing). Kirby “The Sky is Falling” Delauter worked really hard to minimize the impact of the development pipeline and acted like everyone else (Jan) is the problem. The actual problem is that 800 more kids showed up for school this year than had been predicted, so perhaps it is not over-erestimating that is the real danger here. The actual problem is that this pyramid scheme where development theoretically increases the tax base so that you can build roads and schools by starting construction of those some number of years after you build houses that people move into is a patently ridiculous idea that will make everyone miserable, and also make the property values not very attractive.

Billy Shreve wants to reinvent the wheel. Billy wants to know how they predict the number of kids, and birthrate patterns, and Millenials and elders don’t seem to have babies. It wasn’t presented at all with the degree of snark we think it merits, but it sure sounds like the state is actually able to inform about the number of babies that are born in a given year, and then add 5 years to extrapolate for kindergarteners.

We are tired. We are sorry for not saying anything nice about the nice people who did nice things and tried to promote the less academically able up the levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy. It has been too dramatic a week for your average news junkie, so. G’night.