Perhaps due to the recommendation coming from an “art” commission.

In my own commission work (in obscurity—maybe that was a good thing after all) I and my colleagues offered a set of environmental goals [link] that were adopted by council and which included a “Health-Promoting Urban Environment”, intended to “[e]nsure that the built environment promotes public health and improvements to the natural environment”. Maybe we could have a HPUE commission instead. (That was my intention, to ultimately align the commission structure with the environmental—and later sustainability—goals to the extent it made sense.)

Check out Dreiseitl’s Wikipedia entry. It has links to descriptions of several of his works. Most of them do not involve sculpture. Rather, they use water as a main feature, often with functional water-cleansing attributes such as plants and natural filters. Often they are meant for human interaction (stepping stones, etc.) Probably our city hall application was not fated to be the best display of his work.

Sadly, the hundreds of thousands of dollars for ‘art’ at the sewage treatment plant seems to be dead–if not, looking forward to pounding a stack in the heart of that brilliant idea in the future.

The only time voters were given a chance to express support for public funding of art, they said no. As I recall, there was no organized opposition to the arts millage, but the proponents’ campaign did not convince the voters to support the use of public funds for art.

With regard to the percent for arts program, the Council ended that program before I was elected. That Council left unresolved what would happen to the uncommitted funds accumulated under the terminated percent for arts program. We were faced with the choice of selecting art projects that were sufficiently related to sewers and such or returning the funds to the restricted accounts from which they came.

Now the Arts Commission can recommend public art as part of projects undertaken by the City (baked-in) or look for art that is worth acquiring and using the pre-percent for arts methods of funding.

I consider Eaton and his allies on Councils to be reform-minded good government supporters who are trying to undo the worst excesses of the Hieftje era.

No one should be surprised that those who favor public subsidies of their pet projects will object to the end of the subsidies. That’s politics!

Libby, the Chronicle’s commenting policy is sketched out here: [link].

The vast majority of comments never enter the moderation queue because the default is automatic approval – with the provision that a comment from a first-time commenter is automatically sent to the moderation queue.

Various other technical reasons [hyperlinks, inclusion of various "watch words" typical of trolling comments (I don't think "curmudgeon" is on that list)] can also trigger assignment to the moderation queue.

Once a comment has appeared, we typically leave it in place, even if it doesn’t comply with the basic principle of “Be Generous.” On rare occasion, we’ve moved a comment to the Orphaned Comments page. If I were looking for reasons to banish comments to the Orphaned Comments page – on the grounds that they were not generous or that they engaged in gratuitous personal attack – I’m sure I could spend a chunk of time every day policing comments and arguing the nuances of meaning of words with commenters who feel aggrieved that their comment has been banished but some other comment has not been banished, even though the other comment was a more flagrant violation of whatever principle, etc. So I’m typically not looking for reasons to banish comments. Over the last five and a half years, I’d say that the customary reaction of readership to comments that don’t hew to the “Be Generous” principle has been, in responding, to “Be Generous Anyway.”

That basic approach has allowed me to spend almost no time ever policing comments, and I would like to keep it that way.

In closing, I would not like meta-commentary on the merits of other comments with respect to the commenting policy, or the commenting policy itself, to be a topic for discussion of the remainder of this thread.