Howling at the moon is a better use of your time than replying to a City of Calgary survey.

Anyone believing that someone is actually listening to what you say when responding to one of those ubiquitous “please give us your feedback” requests is soon left standing at the altar of disillusion.

They don’t want to know what you think. City hall’s already done all the thinking required.

Which is why it isn’t surprising that an independent probe into Calgary’s public engagement process, launched 15 months ago, is acknowledging what most of us knew — you can spend oodles of time and money developing a system to ask for public feedback, but if you don’t listen to the results, it becomes nothing more than an elaborate marketing ploy.

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In fact, city administrators could have saved $775,000 of taxpayers’ money if, instead of hiring consultants at KPMG to tell them what’s wrong with the much-ballyhooed public consultation process, they’d simply asked Calgarians.

Instead, councillors spent the........

© Calgary Herald