Imagine that! The cellphone industry is publishing a report that suggests the education industry – one of the largest in the United States – should invest in smartphones for its students. Brilliant.

This reminds me of a situation that came up at my job last year. We were engaging in a contract with a lobbyist to advocate for more dollars to be spent on education facilities. One of the ideas that our boss at the time had was to generate an in-house report showing the need for more facility dollars and how our organization was well positioned to use those dollars most efficiently.

I almost jumped out of my skin.

Can you imagine being a legislator and having ABC Company come up to you and say, “We need more money for Project X. Here is a report showing the need for more money for Project X. Please note that ABC Company is the best organization to utilize extra dollars allocated to Project X.”

Talk about self-serving! Any legislator that is worth their skin would laugh off that report and – if they are really interested in whatever “Project X” happens to be – would commission an independent report. Luckily, through some arguments and some luck, my company partnered with a highly regarded university to create an independent report on the idea of more money for school facilities. It was a much better option than having us do a report in house that essentially says, “Give us money.”

Anyway, you can read the full text of the New York Times article, but trust me – it’s slightly ridiculous.

Jones said that after touring 162 Broadway, he came to a certain conclusion: If there was no redevelopment there, the city still would have condemned the building and demolished it, as an unsafe structure.

A portion of the ground floor, which had been home to a commercial tenant until late in 2007, was in the best shape, but the rest of the building was suffering from a lack of maintenance, he said. There were holes in the walls, ceiling, roof and windows, which had allowed rain to enter, deteriorating the structure further, and the items and materials that had been stored there were literally moldering where they sat.

Yeah…that’s not “blight” at all! Ha! What was most disturbing about this situation was the way that Brown tried to piggyback on the the MTOTSA folks – people who had a real gripe with eminent domain abuse. But (dare I say this), the legal system actually worked in this process! The MTOTSA organization won their battle against Long Branch (as they should have) and Brown lost his battle (as he should have). There is justice in this system!

For more background on this situation and some interesting comments from guests to this blog, feel free to visit a previous post on the subject.