I clearly remember the strangest decision I had to make as an elected official. Sitting in a room with my fellow school board members, our top administrators, and several architects, we were asked to determine and agree upon something fairly amusing but surprisingly important.
That something was the average width of the gluteal assemblages of Plainfield residents. Put another way, how wide were everyone’s butt cheeks?
It might seem like a silly or absurd question, but it was critically important. When you’re building a new stadium, basketball gym, and a natatorium (what architects call swimming pools), and spectators will watch competitions in those facilities while sitting in bleachers, you have to know how many square inches their posteriors will occupy.
Suppose you want your new basketball gym to hold 2500 people. Before the architects can determine how many feet of bleachers that will require, they need to know just how wide each of those 2500 rear ends will be. While you’d assume there are agreed-upon standards for such things, we learned that wasn’t the case. (The only thing everyone seemed to agree upon is that they’re continuing to get wider, so think bigger rather than smaller.)
You might also assume the room was full of snickers and cheeky comments, but it was an intensely serious conversation. No grins, no laughter. The bigger the average butt size, the wider the bleachers would have to be and the larger the buildings holding those bleachers would have to be, driving the budget higher, which would further increase property taxes.
Lacking the resources to gather 100 random residents and ask them to sit on yardsticks, we had to make the call before the architects could move ahead. After about 20 minutes of serious discussion, someone suggested that 21 inches was the magic number. Nods around the room. Now the architects could proceed with their design of the new Plainfield High School’s athletic facilities.
Like all elected officials, I frequently found myself having to make difficult decisions about all sorts of things I never expected. That comes with the territory. But none of those decisions (or meetings) were ever as strange as the day we gathered to determine the size of our community’s average rear end. Just something to keep in mind if you ever think of running for office.