OK you can delete this if it’s too tangential or self referential or if I am just persona non grata on these pages: [Palo Alto Weekly, column about dinosaur exhibit at Palo Alto Children’s Museum, by Diana Diamond; in fact they did delete my post]
It’s a typo: we the people paid consultant Peter Kageyama $5000 to spitball a bunch of ways to show how much we love our city, in 2015 not 2005.

The big Takeaway was we gave $500 to a citizen to procure and then trot around a stuffed animal that looked like the Bol park donkeys Perry and Miner. 

My idea was to hire the musician Ralph Carney for the same $500 to go down to the park and play clarinet and see how the donkeys would react. Carney had played on a Tom Waits record called “the mule variations” and was from Akron the same hometown as Peter. Also it would have honored the late Malcolm Smith a music professor who lived in barren park and loved the donkeys. 

It never happened although I did leave a voicemail to Ralph who unfortunately died in an accident soon around that time.

But my point is that if you have a lot of local knowledge you can spend money better than just what I unfortunately think our leadership is doing where maybe they have not researched either the need for the dinosaurs or who can make them better and cheaper.

[original post: Couple related points:
1) in 2005, the City paid a consultant Peter Kageyama to lead a workshop that included giving a resident $500 to make a replica of the Bol Park donkey;
2) Rufus the bobcat a former actual feature at the old Palo Alto Zoo, was stuffed and on display at the Mid Pen Open Space District headquarters, last I looked (don’t know if he survived the move)

I’d rather spend the money on music in the parks.]