To All Beavers of Slatsville Who May Have Been Affected by Recent Events:

It has come to my attention that the past several months have been difficult for our Timberborn settlement, and some of you have not felt seen by the management of Slatsville. This could not be further from the truth, but words are cheap and actions speak louder so as your manager I am personally extending this apology.

I am sorry. I need to do better and I will do better, and that process starts with taking accountability.

I am sorry that I did not notice the food warehouses and water tanks were slowly emptying well before the Cycle 4 Drought. I am sorry that apparently my first response to learning of the resulting food shortage was that “this will self-correct, don’t worry about it.” While true, obviously a devastating famine is not the mechanism by which any of us would like to handle these issues.

I regret that the Great Reservoir I built to address future drought issues was overtopped by the radioactive runoff of the Cycle 7 Badtide which killed all our crops and forests and led to the Second Great Famine of Cycle 8.

I do feel I must point out, purely for the sake of fairness, that this led to meaningful reforms and an attempt to prevent recurrences of this issue. The flood and famine prompted construction of the Badtide Diversion Runoff Channel so that never again would our drinking water and arable farmland be inundated by radioactive floodwaters.

However, the fact that the Great Badtide Diversion Runoff Channel did not have enough capacity to channel all the runoff into the river was regrettable. As was the backwash of radioactive waste that flooded the Industrial Canyon District as well as most of our farmland (again). I have heard your stories and felt your pain over this incident. But all this was also completely unforeseeable, and I am comforted by the fact that nobody could have prevented this disaster.

I do apologize for the fact that Slatsville’s network for roads and bridges (the envy of the world) is such a finely-tuned and efficient system that I could not shut down the flooded roads in the affected districts and build detours to job sites and resource depots. I regret that so many beavers had to commute daily through the Unforeseeable Badwater Disaster Memorial Lake for multiple cycles until they succumbed to the effects of contamination.

With the benefit of hindsight, I can see how expanding working hours to 18 hours a day to deal with our sudden labor shortage increased the strain of an already challenging and upsetting situation. In my defense, I assumed workers would deal with issues like thirst and hunger as they arose and the fact some staff began expiring outside their places of work feels like an outcome where responsibility must be shared.

While I think we can all agree that the Slatsville Zipline Network revolutionized transit in our city, I acknowledge that ziplines were not the appropriate solution for the obstructions caused by the Unforeseeable Badwater Disaster Memorial Lake. Bottlenecking the economy of Slatsville around the procurement of advanced materials to complete the Slatsville Zipline Network was not a net positive at that juncture. I recognize that had those resources been more effectively deployed, we might have been able to produce treatment for victims of the Unforeseeable Badwater Disaster.

We can take a great deal of pride in how we rallied as a community in the face of these tragedies and bounced back with a bigger and more productive Slatsville than ever. But here I have to put my hand up and say that it was probably premature to focus so exclusively on building the Great Slatsville Social Housing Ziggurat (boasting the latest amenities like gravity battery-powered carousels for kits of all ages). While I think we can all agree the Social Housing Ziggurat was a huge success, I admit that its runaway success and desirability created a population boom that overwhelmed our food supply network and led to the Population Correction of Cycle 11.

That said, it is unfair and insensitive both to me and experiencers of the Population Correction to call the Social Housing Ziggurat “Zacny’s Corpse Warehouse”. In the future, please refer to it and its neighborhood by their new name: ZoHo.

I trust this message has cleared the air between us. We’ve come through a lot together these last many cycles, and we’re still here. Because we’re Slatsville Strong.

Humbly and with gratitude,

Rob Zacny, Slatsville City Manager

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