You Can Take the Governor out of Hollywood
... but you can’t take Hollywood out of the Governor:
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger traveled to a quiet San Jose neighborhood Thursday, and—dogged by protesters—filled a pothole dug by city crews just a few hours before, as part of an attempt to dramatize his efforts to increase money for transportation projects.
The neighbors, it seems, were a little baffled:
“For paving the streets, it’s a lot of lighting,’’ said resident Nick Porrovecchio, 48, motioning to a team of workmen setting up Hollywood-style floodlights on the street to bathe the gubernatorial podium in a soft glow.
Porrovecchio and his business partner, Joe Greco, said that at about 7 a.m. they became fascinated watching “10 city workers standing around for a few hours putting on new vests,’’ all in preparation for the big moment with Schwarzenegger.
But their street, he noted, didn’t even have a hole to pave over until Thursday morning.
“They just dug it out,’’ Porrovecchio said, shrugging. “There was a crack. But they dug out the whole road this morning.’’
“It’s a lot of money spent on a staged event,’’ said Matt Vujevich, 74, a retiree whose home faced the crew-made trench that straddled nearly the whole street. “We still have the same problems. Everything’s a press conference.’’
[...]
Greco, who used his video camera to record the crews ripping up his street, said Laguna Seca Way had “a few cracks,” which he termed “unsightly,’’ but they weren’t as bad as the “major potholes’’ a few blocks away.
“The street was very drivable,’’ Vujevich said.
If the roads are bad enough as to justify spending untold gazillions of dollars on repair or replacement, you’d think it wouldn’t be terribly hard to find an actual pothole to fill, even a photogenic pothole.
My favorite bit from the article is this glorious morsel of political damage-control from David Vossbrink, director of communications for the San Jose Mayor’s office:
In this case, Vossbrink said, the governor’s event involved “not exactly filling a pothole, but it represented the pothole aspect’’ of the transportation funding measure.
So it wasn’t so much a good deed as it was a representation of a good deed.
That’s my governor!