Our City

Last night was another first for me, I attended a town hall. Judging from the remarks from the mayor and others, attendance was just this side of spectacular, the largest in the history of such events in our fair city. An agenda was distributed and then Mayor Jensen opened the meeting with a welcome and a call for civility which was largely honored. Police Chief Knapp then provided a overview of Police Department needs, focused primarily on facility issues. A group of local library supporters kicked off a series of speakers in support of the measure to raise the levy on library operating funds. The initial appeal for more operating funds morphed over the speakers to a call to support building a new library. Frankly, I never got a clear picture of why a new library is needed other than the parking and access to the existing library are woefully inadequate. This portion of the program concluded with a speaker from the organization that is holding an anonymous million dollar donation telling us about how the donor is supporting a fund raiser to find additional donations for a new library.

The mayor and another community member spoke on the long history of attempts to find an adequate home for the police department. The woman who spoke on this particularly emphasized the repeated cost of studies made during these efforts. The city administrator followed with a summary of current city plan for building a new library and converting and expanding the existing library into a police facility almost six times as large as the current facility.

A very cursory presentation of a so called "people's plan" followed which involved moving the current public works facilities to another location, building a new library at the current public works site, moving city hall into the existing library, putting the police department into the current city hall and finally resurrecting the old fire damage boys and girls club into a community center. This plan was discounted by the presenters as being too complex and costly. That the proponents of this plan were not allowed to present it frankly weakened the city staff's critic for me. Councilman Zimmerman a proponent of the people's plan did make an after the fact argument for the plan. How effective he was able to be in view of the prior skewed presentation remains to be seen.

The meeting was then open to questions and comment by the town hall attendees. At this point I will need to abandon any further efforts to report on the various questions, comments, and rebuttals made by the public and city staff, as I made no effort to record them in the detail they warranted.

I lost a lot of sleep last night tossing and turning as I tried to get my head around the plans that were being presented and what I could get behind. I came to the conclusion that the solutions being proposed just don't make good sense to me. First I am not sure that I can agree with some fundamental assumptions of this debate. So let me start with some basic questions/concerns that I feel are pertinent.

First do we really need a new library? What I heard last night only convinced me that we need additional parking and a better access/egress plan for the library.

Let's examine my fundamental concept of a library. Libraries are repositories for the accumulated knowledge, wisdom, and cultural minutia of mankind. Libraries differ from museums primarily in that the material's provided are expected to be readily and generally available for use. Library staff perform the essential tasks of creating and maintaining systematic access and order to the materials housed in the library. A library without a committed, knowledgeable, well motivated, service oriented staff is about as useful as my attic.

You'll notice that my definition of a library says nothing about the form a library actually takes. Historically, the first libraries were oral, embodied in the story teller lineages of our most ancient ancestors. Subsequently scribes, provided more lasting but still relatively fragile and transitory materials from which to build our libraries. Gutenberg brought mass production and opened the doors to the modern library. Technology is once again altering the fundamental substrate upon which we will be recording our accumulated knowledge, wisdom and cultural minutia. Today we are imprinting this information on atomic scales. The consequence of this is that I can carry in my hand a substantial portion of the Library of Congress. It's entire contents and frankly digital representations of every unique item in all the worlds libraries could easily fit on a single wall in my home. I will not be surprised if that will shrink to something that I can hold in my hand in the not too distant future. The upshot of this discussion is that we are about to undergo a significant change in how we will deliver library services.

I expect that fewer and fewer physical manifestations of our literature, books, magazines, newspaper will be produced. More and more archives will be converted to digital forms. I know that there are many people who dread such a future, especially those devoted bibliophiles for whom the touch, scent, and sight of tome upon tome running off into the mysterious darkness in library stacks are the truest rendition of heaven. What is coming are simple ubiquitous tablets that techno-magically render in visual and/or aural ways the contents of the all the libraries of man. Over time our librarians will find themselves supplanted by technology because they can't match the speed and comprehensiveness of artificially intelligent search engines. It will take a while for this future to manifest, judging from the changes I've seen in my life, I can easily imagine this taking place in the next 20 years and most likely sooner.

Now a library is more than the collection materials it holds. It provides a wealth of programs and meets a variety individual and community needs. I don't think the need for library's will disappear, but I do believe that less and less space will be needed to house the content of libraries. In my opinion, the days of large libraries are over. I would argue that an investment in small neighborhood based libraries makes much more sense. A million dollars may not build a large brick and mortar library today, but if could easily pay for 3 or 4 modest community libraries. Placing these in proximity to the people who use them reduces the need for travel to and from the libraries. Built with green technologies they can serve as models of a better way to live sustainably. The facilities if properly designed could serve as community refuges in times of danger. Hours of operation could conform better to the needs of a smaller community thus achieving operational efficiencies. Many of our communities today lack a focal point for the exercise of community. Large public edifices are ill suited to supporting the kinds of gatherings that serve to build and unite communities. Smaller facilities are often more welcoming and approachable.

Our current library might be insufficient to serve the current needs of the entire city, but it would certainly be adequate to serving it's local community. Distributing community based library facilities throughout our city would allow us to add capacity in tandem with our actual growth, thereby omitting many of the limitations and problems created by faulty foresight.

I believe that much of what I have said about libraries applies to police stations as well. Do we need/want a monolithic edifice to house our law enforcement and public safety functions? Should this edifice attempt to balance legitimate security needs with needs for open access for the public?

I have been in the current police facility and I absolutely support providing our law enforcement folks with much better facilities than they currently are being subjected to.

We know from experiences in the past decade that it can take only single dedicated terrorist, eg. Timothy James McVeigh, to bring down any large building. Frankly, it doesn't make sense to me to build such targets in the first place. Terrorists are only one of many potential threats to our public safety people and a minor one at that. Mother nature is a far more likely and deadly threat. In view of this I believe that decentralization of our public safety facilities is both a more pragmatic and ultimately cost effective approach to meeting public safety facility needs.

Decentralization of our public safety facilities serves many purposes:

1. It geographically distributes physical risk to our public safety facilities from man made or natural cataclysmic events.
2. It would help ensure that needed resources are accessible from different places in our city.
3. It would facilitate implementation of community policing practices.
4. It would allow gradations of security appropriate to actual needs.
5. It would help minimize response times in times of critical need by reducing travel times.
6. It would allow us to add capacity in tandem with the actual growth of our city.
7. I suspect there are more points to be added here but right now they are not coming to me, feel free to suggest them via comments to this post.

Let me state something now that I think is important our city's public safety facilities. Creating a safe and secure environment requires much thought and planning, furthermore, it requires thought and planning that is frankly far outside the realm of the average person's experience. Secure facilities are most successful when they are purposefully build. Taking a library or any other building for that matter and attempting to convert it to a truly secure facility is laughable in my opinion. There are a many levels of security, the tighter they become the more costly they are to implement. Cost containment can be had by insuring that the level of security is justified by the need.

Building a community police station that provides primarily administrative support and public access to basic services does not demand a fortress.

The next level of security requires the management of people who are potentially harmful to themselves or others. Facilities to protect everyone in such circumstances require controlled access, egress, and short term isolation and/or confinement. It makes sense to me to locate investigatory assets in facilities with this level of security.

At the town hall much was made of the lack of adequate physical security for evidential property in the city. My contention is that the best security and most cost effective for this are remote/isolated facilities (bunkers) with multiple physical barriers (high fences and lots of razor wire) and tightly controlled entry/egress points. I believe that collocation of manned communication , forensic labs, data and administrative centers, etc. with evidential property sites is an excellent match.

I would also contend that the public information and public administration functions of the police department are best located in or near city hall.

Another item that came up at the town hall that I found particularly interesting were the comments regarding the $300,000 plus communication's van that the police have obtained. I applaud the efforts of our public safety folks to acquire this resource. Now I have to ask, how are we going to use it? What are it's capabilities? If those capabilities are important enough to warrant its use in times of emergency, wouldn't they also be useful in day to day operations?
Furthermore, wouldn't it be best if they were actually used on a day to day basis to insure that they were in fact operational at the time an emergency occurred; that not only our public safety staff but all our public employees were trained and skilled in the use of this emergency communications resource through daily use? I don't really get why we would acquire something as basic as communications capabilities and then limit our use of them to emergency situations.

Let me conclude this missive with a few comments about the future as I see it. I believe that we as country have been undergoing profound changes during my generation, I am a tail end baby boomer. I believe that we have been undergoing a massive wealth transfer from the middle and lower classes to the coffers of a small and increasingly affluent upper class. I believe that we are seeing diminishing opportunities for education, employment and upward social movement. I believe that "free market" capitalism as an economic system is based on false assumptions and that the system currently in place is anything but free and competitive.

I want very much to believe that my country is the best that it can be and the best in the world. I love America, she is my homeland. I'm a veteran and I believe that in some small way I've earned the right to be critical of her. My country is on a path now that truly frightens me. Disinformation, out right lies, hate speech, bigotry, run rife in our nation. A sizable group of individuals and organizations are responsible for most of it, funded by corporations controlled by a network of interlocking of corporate boards, executives, and wealthy individuals. I do believe that they believe that their world view is the right one. I disagree.

I strongly doubt that our economic woes will rebound in the near term and that we will see appreciable economic growth for a long while. Too many fundamental economic factors are going in the wrong directions. Loss of capital resources and manufacturing to the far east, corruption in government, business, and main stream media all bode ill for us. All of this is way beyond any influence I can bring to bear on the world. So I am choosing to focus most of my energy effecting what I can reach, my community. I hope that you will have found some worth while ideas to chew on in the above. I welcome your civil comments.

Sincerely,

Gayland Gump aka Muckwa Ogimaa aka Red Path Walker