(Opinion) Good news: The people who run city government never make mistakes. If someone steals, say, $6 million of school money or $85,000 of cop money on their watch, they don’t need to accept any responsibility at top levels or do anything different. They just need to call in a consultant to write a new policy. That’s what the Elicker administration did after discovering that a former police chief (who was arrested Friday) allegedly stole confidential informant and youth athletic league money to feed a multimillion-dollar sports gambling habit. They called in PERF — the Police Executive Research Fund (PERF) to help them write a new confidential informant fund policy. Problem fixed! Never mind that we also called in PERF in 2008 after a similar scandal. They helped us write a new policy then to fix the problem. We called them in again in 2016. To update the policy so the problem wouldn’t recur. Now we have a big snowstorm projected to hit the city Sunday night through Monday. We’re still trying to dig out from las month’s snowstorm. The Elicker administration has not publicly apologized or taken responsibility for a mammoth failure in clearing the snow from that storm, any more than it has for past systemic failures on its watch. Will they do better this time? Let’s hope they put in a call to PERF for some help fixing their snow policy. Seems like that might do the trick. Those are among the news stories broken down in the latest edition of the New Haven Independent vlog news summary direct from our assignment desk — er, compost heap. Click on the above video to watch it; add your own thoughts below in the comments section.(Note: The opinions expressed in these articles/videos are solely those of the author/bloviator. They do not necessarily reflect the views of anyone else associated with the New Haven Independent, the Independent itself, or polite society.) The post Can PERF Dig Us Out Of This Snowstorm, Too? appeared first on New Haven Independent. ...read more read less