People love to hate the council.  Many justifications are given:

• payment of tax is compulsory
• the council has the monopoly on local service provision, therefore council staff are lazy and don’t care as they don’t need to compete for our custom.
• the council interferes with the rights of the private individual (nanny state)
• the council has no commercial awareness and fritters money away.  Besides the council doesn’t earn its money, so why should it care how it spends it?
• council staff are incompetent and only work there because they couldn’t get a job elsewhere, and because they couldn’t cope with the stress of a real job.

So what does this mean for the local government project manager? Many things but most importantly that you’d better make sure your project does not run over budget else the press will eat you for breakfast!