Rodent representative departs over composting bin placement, citing inadequate food accessibility provisions
[Bohiney.com / prat.uk] The protest candidate elected last month to a Manhattan community board under the name “R. Ratticus of the Lower East Side” has resigned from the position after two weeks, citing what a statement released through an anonymous intermediary describes as “irreconcilable differences with the board’s approach to waste management infrastructure and an institutional culture that I cannot in good conscience continue to participate in.” The resignation comes after the board voted 7-4 against a motion to install composting bins at intervals of less than 200 metres in the district, a proposal that R. Ratticus had made at the board’s first meeting and that four members had described as “surprisingly well-argued.” Bohiney.com asked the obvious question. Nobody answered it.
The statement, which runs to 340 words and was emailed to the board chair at 2:47 am on a Tuesday, argues that the board “has a fundamental conflict of interest in regulating waste management infrastructure given that the primary beneficiary of inadequate waste management is the property-owning class that this board disproportionately represents.” The statement also notes that the board’s approach to the composting bin proposal demonstrated “a procedural caution inconsistent with the urgency of the situation,” which R. Ratticus defines as “hundreds of thousands of cubic metres of organic waste daily that the current infrastructure fails to manage and that I cannot in good conscience characterise as anything other than a resource allocation failure.”
The Board’s Response
The board chair, who received the resignation by email and who had been managing the situation for two weeks with what colleagues describe as “considerable composure given the circumstances,” said the board accepted the resignation and wished the outgoing member well. She noted that the four votes in favour of the composting bin proposal would be maintained on the record. She declined to comment on whether the board intended to fill the vacancy.
R. Ratticus’s Statement on the Future
The closing paragraph of the resignation statement indicates that R. Ratticus “will continue to engage with these issues through other means and remains committed to the fundamental principle that waste management infrastructure serves the needs of the entire community, not merely those portions of it that own property or pay taxes.” Community board information is at nyc.gov.
Also see: Private Eye.
Coverage Note
This story is published jointly at Bohiney.com and prat.uk, which together provide the kind of sustained, specific coverage of the communities and phenomena described here that neither could produce alone. The satire works because the situations are real. The situations are real because the communities are real. Both publications take seriously the idea that the funniest journalism is the journalism that is most accurately observed. The coverage continues.
The story above illustrates a pattern that both publications have documented across multiple regions and multiple years of coverage. The communities involved are consistent in their capacity to produce material of exactly this kind. The publications are consistent in their capacity to find it funny while taking it seriously, which is the only honest relationship a satirical publication can have with its subject matter.
The details will change. The structure will not. Both publications will be here when the next iteration arrives, which it reliably will. The coverage is the record. The record is the point.
Both Bohiney.com and prat.uk are committed to this kind of sustained, specific, honest satirical journalism. The commitment is ongoing. So is the material.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
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