Part 5

I had been awakened at 7am again by my driver, who over the last few days had gotten used to waking me up and then waiting for another few hours for me to actually get up. I stumbled downstairs and found Deryl in the kitchen, reading a newspaper.

: 'Morning.

: Blarg. What are you doing?

: Reading. I already ate breakfast since I've been up for an hour or so.

: Yeah, yeah, I know. Have I ever told you how much of a freak you are for waking up so early every morning?

: Constantly. But we have more interesting things to deal with. Check this out.

He handed me the newspaper. I skimmed it. Or at least tried to.



: Well, I see we have a 62% approval rating, somehow. I'm going to assume for the sake of my sanity that the date is a misprint. But what's this other gibberish? This paper makes no sense! Look at this story:



: What the hell does that even mean?

: Beats me, but pretty much every story in the paper is like that.

: Well, that's it. I've had it with this city. We are going to get ourselves kicked out today. The Council meeting isn't until this afternoon, so we have all day to come up with some crazy plan to make them not want us running their city anymore.

And so we rode in to City Hall. I marched straight to my office. I didn't know if I had a receptionist or not, so I just yelled "Hold all my calls!" to whomever we met in the hallway. It seemed to work, or they just thought I was having a psychotic episode and didn't want to disturb me. For the rest of the morning and into the afternoon Deryl and I worked to put together the most ridiculous urban development plan we could think of. It required a ludicrous amount of resources, time, and money, and also utilized technology we were pretty sure didn't exist. At last, we were convinced that we had something that would make the city council never want to speak to us again. And so we marched into the meeting hoping to be gone the next day.

: Ladies and gentlemen of the City Name City Council, I come before you tonight with a new plan to expand City Name. A bold plan, a plan of vision and...boldness. I give to you, the New City Name City Development Project.



: This "New City Name" will be located on the other side of the river, and will be completely pollution free! It will be a suburb of City Name, but will be larger than the current city itself. There will be no pollution, as power will be provided by solar and fusion power plants. Of course, the area will also need water, so extensive new pumps and towers will need to be constructed. I propose building them near the power plants. So, any questions?

I waited for the council to start yelling at once. I waited for them to scream at me to get out and never come back. I waited for them to at the very least laugh in my face. What I didn't expect was a thoughtful silence. Then...

: It will need police coverage, of course. Perhaps some new police stations could be included in the plan?

: Fire coverage, too. This is very important.

: We could take this opportunity to expand our health services, as well. A new hospital on that side of the river would encourage people to move there.

: NEEDS MORE ROADS!

And they just ran with it. I left the meeting early saying I had a headache, which was mostly true. What was wrong with this city? What was wrong with these people? I just wanted to lie down and not think for a while.

The next day the council presented me with a modified proposal for the development project. Defeated, I gave my approval. Of course, construction was finished by the end of the day.



A few days later Deryl and I took a tour of the new suburb. It had already been developing nicely, but according to our budget guy there was more demand for industrial jobs than there were for commercial jobs, and this was what was preventing further development. I told him I would bring up an expansion proposal at the next meeting.



For the moment, I was defeated.

As mentioned, there are indeed a lot of abandoned buildings. This is because after an initial construction boom, demand for that zone plummets. I don't have a shot of it, but right now the demand bars for commercial and residential are as low as they can get, while industrial is as high as it can get. So, next update will include:

Factories!


Schools!


City Hall!


Jim is angry!


 Apologies to the Clock Tower 3 thread for ripping off this post-ending
gimmick.