Broken government running out of time: Tale of the dangerously broken bench on our Bayfront

There's a broken bench on our Bayfront.  There's exposed rebar.  Someone could get badly hurt.

A citizen reported it to the City Manager's office, which responded in writing, "There's nothing we can do" because it belongs to the Department of Transportation.

My friend Warren Celli contacted me about it a few minutes ago.

I wrote the City (no response, natch) and called the Assistant General Counsel of DOT and then the DOT office in Jacksonville, sharing the photograph (below) at 4:12 PM on March 27, 2015.

DOT will now fix it.

Stay tuned.  Set your watch.

What I did is standard operating procedure in government.  It's self-evident human technology.

While it took a few minutes of telephoning, it solved the problem.

Solving problems?  Intergovernmental cooperation? That's what governments do, right?

Here in St. Augustine, "it takes a village" because our deeply defensive, dysfunctional City government is, in the words of FDR, quoting Dante, "Frozen in the ice of its own indifference."