One of my favorite broadway musicals has always been Oliver the Lionel Bart adaptation of the Charles Dickens classic Oliver Twist. (My wife and I even made a point of seeing this show performed live in London a few years back.)

One of Bart’s catchiest and most memorable musical numbers is Oom-Pah-Pah. Here are some of the lyrics and the chorus…

…If you’ve got the patience,
Your own imaginations
will tell you just exactly what you want to hear:

Oom-pah-pah! Oom-pah-pah!
That’s how it goes,
Oom-pah-pah! Oom-pah-pah!
Ev’ryone knows…
They all suppose what they want to suppose
When they hear oom-pah-pah

I noticed my lovely wife singing this tune as she made coffee this morning, and the lyrics struck me as very relevant to our efforts to keep the highlands revitalization moving forward.

It seems to me that parties on all sides of our highland controversy, including both elected officials and citizens, are letting their imaginations tell them exactly what they want to hear about one another’s agendas and motives. Heck, I’m even doing it too, and I have open lines of communication to both sides of this dipute.

I’ve recieved sooooo much email this weekend about the Highlands Advisory Committee that I know we will all have to make a special effort to make this committee a success. I have a few ideas, and I will try to implement them, but after that I need to ask everyone to pull together on this.

Membership:

There are seven councilmembers, and I think they hold seven different ideas about the perfect composition of this committee. As I stated publically at last week’s Committee of the Whole, I would personally like to see us lean toward inclusiveness. However, there is another perspective that anytime you form a working committee too many members can bog down the committee’s progress.

Having said this, for those of you in the community that would like to see more HCA representation, I believe I MIGHT be able to get council support for adding one more HCA member. If I do, it probably won’t be unanymous and I will really have to push to get the votes. The HCA member who was next on P&D Committees list is Sandel, because of her long history of leadership in the highlands and her constant involvment in city meetings on this topic (including her presence at the P&D committee meeting where the advisory committee was being defined).

Taping of the Meetings:

This subject is a bit trickier than taping Council Meetings or Planning Commission Meetings, both of which I always advocate strongly for. Planning Commissioners, City Council Members, and the Mayor are all public servants with authority, and Open Public Meetings act supports complete openess of their actions. So government taping and distribution of the above meetings is the best way to go in my book.

Update on 10/11/06: Renton citizen Inez Peterson posed this question to the State Attorney General’s office, and she recieved a response which clarifies that taping of this forum is permitted. Read part 1 of the official response here …and part 2 here. This information is being forwarded around city hall.

To make any progress here, we will all have to try to ignore the usual music that begins whenever we talk about the highlands…:-)

Oom-pah-pah! Oom-pah-pah!
Ev’ryone knows…
They all suppose what they want to suppose
When they hear oom-pah-pah