There is a term in business called FUD. FUD stands for Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt. It is often used in marketing, to attack\u00a0a competing idea\u00a0by eliciting fear about what could happen if a competing idea\u00a0happens. In hyper local terms you could describe\u00a0City Council person Andy Beerman’s appearance on KPCW this morning as FUD when he said we need to keep a seat at the Mountain Accord because the alternative was to be eaten. OMG, I don’t want to be eaten, do you?<\/p>\n
That’s FUD.<\/p>\n
Earlier this week, Park City School District Master Planning Committee Chairperson Rory Murphy was presenting to a group of citizens about why the School District Committee felt we needed to tear down Treasure Mountain Junior High (TMJH). He brought up a new fact that I hadn’t heard before; he said that TMJH was built using unreinforced masonry. This means that during a significant earthquake the structure may\u00a0collapse in on itself, leaving many children and teachers dead. For a description of this, see a hypothetical description<\/a> from the Deseret News that describes what would happen if “the big one hits.”<\/p>\n Scary. For sure. One Park Rag commenter said, “‘unreinforced masonry’ YIKES. TMMS is a time bomb.” It sure sounds\u00a0scary.<\/span><\/p>\n Yet, I always have a little bit of scepticism. Is “unreinforced masonry” being used by the School District as another, in a long line of reasons, for why TMJH should be torn down? What would it take for me to believe this was actually a concern based on fact and not FUD?<\/p>\n If the answer to these the question is no, then “unreinforced masonry”, regardless of whether it’s a real problem, may just be being being used in a long line a reasons to convince the public to tear down a school built in 1983 and renovated more recently. The reasons I’ve heard for tearing it down include:<\/p>\n Again, I don’t say this to make light of a potential issue. Yet, every time a new bomb<\/strong> is dropped, it makes it seem like all the previous bombs weren’t enough to scare the public. What I need to know to be convinced is that this issue is a big enough concern that it has been considered across all the schools in our district (present and future) and that they have estimated the price of a retrofit to the current school.<\/p>\n Until we get that, it seems a little bit like the District that Cried Wolf. It doesn’t mean that the wolf doesn’t eventually show up at the end of the story but it means that the public increasing discounts everything said (possibly to everyone’s detriment).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There is a term in business called FUD. FUD stands for Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt. It is often used in marketing, to attack\u00a0a competing idea\u00a0by…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/v2.parkrag.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4135"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/v2.parkrag.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/v2.parkrag.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/v2.parkrag.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/v2.parkrag.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4135"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/v2.parkrag.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4135\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/v2.parkrag.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/v2.parkrag.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/v2.parkrag.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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