Dear George,

While Sue [Lewis] has a point about there probably being " many routine (and special) expenditures that some citizens would object to if they were made public", I think it misses the mark here. This is a very public expenditure by it's very nature. No amount of staff explanation can justify spending so much money on an artificial (and ugly) tree to someone who has nothing to eat, or less dramatically, to a taxpayer who still has no sidewalk on his street. To spend $20,000.00 on temporary decorations is simply wrong.

Steven Miller (electronic mail, December 11, 2000).