BAD news is good news. Correct?

Wrong.

Over the past few weeks, local newshounds and newshawks have noticed a dearth of fresh scandals unearthed on the past Lim administration by City Hall functionaries. Either that – a real, palpable absence of new brickbats to divulge or hurl on the defeated city administration – or the usual mouthpieces, notably city legal beagle and ex-judge George Mejia has finally imbibed the dictum “Discretion is the better part of valor.”

If so, good for him, and good for City Hall too.

The spectacle apparently consciously created by Mejia et al. the past months over the “sins and excesses” of the past city executives and loudly blared over radio and printed in newspapers almost since Day One of the Fernandez administration must have a “shelf life” of its own. Sure, it gets media mileage and brings forth popular effect but as the Yanks say, you can’t forever beat a dead horse. It has to end sometime

Now, it’s time for honest-to-goodness governance and no more of the “mental baggages” that all too often characterize the public pronouncements in the first few months of new powerholders. It is time to grab the bull by the horns, so to speak, and if it had gone wayward in the past, rein it in with all the muscle and mind of the new rodeo artist, all on the rodeoman’s own skills, maneuvers and time.

The actions on past misgovernance, if any, are best left acted or worked out not under the glare of spotlights but on the silent, patient, painstaking legwork in the courts or such other pertinent fora for redress of grievances. And when the result of these shall finally come forth, then should the gongs and cymbals be sounded for all to know the city had done its spadework successfully, surely and well.

That is sound public administration. That is real public relations – doing something good and letting the public know about it.

Never before one has actually done “something good” at all.