The Streets Are Paved With Gold

Before I emigrated to this city, I was told "The streets were paved with gold", and they were right!

It's not high quality gold - like a half a karat gold - and not the whole street, just the yellow line down the middle.

What you think when you hear that over in the old country is that you can just dig up the street and use it for currency if things get tight, and things always get tight. 

Trouble is, everyone else has the same idea. When you dig it up, the department of Public Works comes and fills it up again, so really, that depresses the price of gold quite a lot. Plus, there's a little tax on it, like a property tax that goes up the more the streets have to have their gold refilled.  So, it's like finding a quarter on the sidewalk. 

Good luck finding anything for a quarter. 

It doesn't take a genius to figure out the real money is in the Public Works Department. Sure, there are laws restricting access to the street filling gold material, and it follows the chain of provenance just like criminal evidence does. It's actually pretty tight. But at every transition point, every transit point, there's a possibility of expropriation. And the gold gleaners have a pretty standard routine: dig up the streets in a particular pattern so the Public Works gold paving trucks will follow a predictable route, and grab just enough gold when it's exposed so it's under the "shrinkage" limit. Then you have to take it home to a home smelter, and that has to be hidden from the thermal detection vans that prowl the streets. It's one of those situations that quickly becomes more trouble than it's worth. 

So, the City Council recently decided that the positive publicity of "gold in the streets" is not worth it, and they actually lose money on it, so last month they started replacing the center lines with painted yellow ones like other cities have. It's actually a lot more visible than the old gold center lines. It means faster traffic, though, because people used to be more cautious and curious around the gold in the street. 

Remediating the street was a municipal task, so it went to the lowest bidder of course. They got a slightly higher quote than they wanted, but the Council signed off on it, and it was finished up last week, except for getting some of the specialized trucks off the streets that were parked there. 

My rock hunting niece called me yesterday with some very interesting information. She was walking on the way to the bus, and while crossing the street she heard some ticking in her backpack. It turns out she had turned on her Geiger counter by mistake, and to make a long story short, the yellow lines in the middle of the street are full of depleted uranium waste. So basically, we decided to replace the inert street gold with material that turned the whole city into a Superfund site. 

Surreptitiously peeling off some stickers on the remaining trucks, it turns out the real paving company, run by the mayor's cousin, has had many judgements against it and is forbidden from operating in the state. 

This story is still breaking, but there doesn't seem to be an  upside to it. Depleted uranium is pretty useless unless you want to poke a hole in a tank or something. It'll either have to be dug up or coated with a layer of lead and real yellow paint, which doesn't sound like a good solution. Online, people are posting how much they like the new, brighter yellow lines and for them, that's the end of the conversation.

Meanwhile, the other city attraction, the Fountain Of Youth, is being shut off after a study concluded that the water therein doesn't make you any younger.