Letter to the editor
A glimmer of hope flickered recently that the damage to Gainesville and its city government of the past 10 years might begin to slow in the next 10 years: the Plan Board and City Commission refused to rush a deeply flawed Comprehensive Plan update to the state.
For context, in spring 2016, a radical shift in governance under an unqualified novice City Manager was supposed to make Gainesville’s city government more efficient. The result soon showed up as the opposite — an echo chamber that’s top-heavy, free-spending, unpredictable, unaccountable, averse to public input, and developer-, UF-, and downtown-centric…