Just what the %$#@! is community anyway?

Yep, another night of sleep lost pondering imponderables!

So yesterday I was engaged in a conversation with one of our city council members and a Lion's Club president.  Our conversation eventually came around to what Ferndale should be doing to improve our "downtown" area.  Which if you haven't been to Ferndale, WA consists of an area on both sides of Main Street roughly 4-5 blocks long.   The City of Ferndale may have a different definition but that is what I believe most Ferndalian's/Ferndaler's  would mean when they refer to downtown.

As we spoke, the LC Pres, revealed that she'd grown up in a small town in the Northeast and knew what a small town should look like.  "The churches are white and look a certain way" kinda stuck in my head.   The city council person noted that they received lots of comments about how ugly downtown was.  As we were standing and talking in the parking lot at the southeast corner of Main and 1st, I looked down the street and realized that I had no real opinion about the downtown. 

I've lived in Ferndale for almost 6 years now.  Downtown is really just bunch of buildings I drive past.  In the entire time I've lived here, I've been in less than half the buildings in the downtown area and most of those only a few times and only 3 or 4 more than a few times.  Simply put unless I am getting something to eat, I rarely have reason to go downtown. 

In the summer they hang flower baskets from the downtown lamp posts and around Christmas they put up some lighted snowflakes and such on them.  On flag days, the Kiwanis, line Main Street with American Flags.  The Ferndale Chamber of Commerce organizes an annual Street Festival in the middle of downtown.  Beyond that I can't think of much that happens downtown of any real note.

Anyway this whole conversation got me to thinking about just what is community and what does it really mean to me, because of late I've been explaining a lot of what I do as wanting to give back to my community. 

Historically, I grew up in suburbia.  The Piggly Wiggly was where we did most of our grocery shopping as I remember, then they put in a strip mall of sorts a few blocks away from home.  Mostly, we drove places to buy what we needed.  We didn't hang out and socialize when we shopped.

I lived most of my early years in homes my father built.  Our lives pretty much revolved around our house.  My dad's family was in and around West Virginia.  My extended family consisted mostly of my Mom's Mom, her brothers and their families.   I saw them on holiday's but not much beyond that. 

Our neighbors were generally friendly and helpful to each other but there again not really a lot of contact.  Family friends were spread all over the county so even the best of them were only seen infrequently.  It was kind of a treat to go visiting.

We weren't a religious family and I personally left the church at around age 12 when I discovered that their god and my god were not the same.

I guess what I am getting to here is that community wasn't really an experience for me as much as it is an idea that I have come to respect.  The thing is I am basically an introvert, meaning most of my attention and energy is directed to or derived from my inner life.  I often find myself not attending to what is going on beyond my own mind.   This doesn't mean that I don't need or care about others.  Though it does explain why I am sometimes clueless about them.

It is clear to me that community is something that I have been learning about for most of my life and yet am still struggling to understand and to know.  Sharing time in sweat lodges did a lot to bring me around to a better understanding or at least a better recognition of the importance of community. 

Community really has little to do with places or things.  It is all about relationships/interdependence.   I really don't care what the downtown looks like because it is not what makes a community viable to my mind.  What community means to me is how we regard each other, how we care for and treat each other.  I prefer a community where I feel safe and can openly be/share myself.  The community I want not only lets me be the best me I can be, it wants to help me do that!  And it wants that for every member of the community!

So the question remains how can we make Ferndale a better community?  What do you mean when you think of community?  What are you really looking for?  I for one would really like to hear what you have to say?

Why vote for Stacy Miller?

Why should you vote for Stacy Miller for Ferndale City Council? First a few facts:

• “About 13.3% of families and 16.8% of the (Ferndale) population were below the poverty line, including 24.2% of those under age 18 and 7.3% of those age 65 or over.” (Wikipedia)
• The web site NWGangs.com lists 18 gangs that it claims have a presence in Whatcom County. Ferndale is one of the cities where some of these gangs are said to be present.
• My discovery of a syringe on my own property tells me that there is drug abuse going on in my neighborhood.

These are just a few facts that indicate Ferndale is not the quaint, idyllic little community of yesteryear, if it was ever that. My travels in and about Ferndale reveal more than a few people walking around who appear afflicted with mental illness and/or are homeless. The late night/early morning inebriated tirades and domestic conflicts punching through my sleep fogged mind on hot summer nights from across the street further reinforce the knowledge that Ferndale is just another typical small American city.

The thing is I want Ferndale to be better than typical. Now we can stick our collective heads in the sand and pretend that these social issues will go away if we ignore them. They won’t.

Ferndale has a pretty active and motivated business community. In fact, the majority of our city council members seem to be heavily pro-business. Not a bad thing in and of itself. They seem to be pro public safety as well, judging by our new police station. While the water issues have ticked off a fair number of city residents, I for one believe that the council’s original intent was to save us all money. The hard water surprised them as much as anyone.

What I don’t see on the council though is someone whose primary interest is looking at the social issues confronting Ferndale. We’ve got people looking out for business, for public safety, and lord knows there are more than a couple fiscal conservatives there making sure that we get our money’s worth.

This is where I think Stacy Miller comes in. Stacy has a long history of service in  business, government, and the non-profit world. She is intimately aware of the costs and benefits of confronting and not confronting social issues. She is a realist. She knows that Ferndale doesn’t have the fiscal resources to support a social service bureaucracy. She also recognizes that ignoring these social issues will not make them go away.

So, what can Stacy do for us? She can seek ways for the city to work effectively and efficiently with non-profits and other governmental bodies to face the social issues confronting Ferndale. She can provide the leadership our community needs to make a better Ferndale. I urge you to vote for Stacy Miller for Ferndale City Council on November 5th.

I expect more from my local news source!

The Ferndale Record ran an article (10/9/2013) on the Ferndale City Council Forum sponsored by the Ferndale Chamber of Commerce.  As would be expected, it was not a verbatim account of what was said, therein lies a problem. The article leaves one with the impression that the candidates were all pretty much on a par. For me this was anything but the case.

What I witnessed  greatly influenced my assessment of candidate performance in the forum. Here are three examples. One candidate appeared so overwhelmed by his presence before the public as to be virtually incapable of putting together complete sentences. Another candidate, spoke in such blue sky academic political philosophical speak, that I found my self almost gasping for air. Yet another was glib enough to answer a question with “What he said”.

It generally goes without saying that local elections rarely generate the much public interest. This was evident in the rather limited turn out for the forum. The bulk of the audience appeared to be, I can only assume, high school civics students. In total, I doubt that there were fewer than 50 people in attendance , though I made no effort to count them, nor apparently did the Record reporter.

Given that there will likely be very few additional opportunities for the public to actually hear from most of the candidates, as well as the low attendance at the forum, it seems even more important that the Record coverage provide more than a sanitized selective summation of the candidates responses.

I don’t envy the reporters task in trying to report about this event. It is impractical to report every word spoken. Lay upon that the presumption that reporting only be factual and value neutral and you’ve got a real problem. In spite of those things, I believe that The Ferndale Record, should have more accurately reflected/characterized the performance of the candidates on the forum.

The performance of candidates in this forum contained real information that should be available to the public. The Ferndale Record has, I believe, a responsibility to the public to do some critical performance assessment. If it couldn’t include it in the article then an attendant editorial would have been appropriate.

Persona non grata

Nearly 6 months have passed since my last post, a couple of days past my 60th birthday, then I seemed to be in a pretty sweet mood, not so recently. In fact, my mood has been pretty foul of late. A couple days ago, my mood expressed itself and today I've been designated "persona non grata" at a class which I have been volunteering at. I am having a wide variety of emotional and intellectual responses to the news.

1. There is depression which is quite in keeping with my history of poor self image, self-denigration, and repeated failure to fit in social norms.
2. There is anger which stems from the social injustice and abuse of power that it represents.
3. There is indignation that someone would judge me based on less than an hour of my life.
4. There is resignation in that I am just too damn tired of defending myself.
5. Etc ...

Here is a list of "offenses" which I believe I committed.

1. I stated that I did not find the facilities we were teaching in suitable to the task.
2. I stated that I was not enamored with our country's educational system, especially higher education and it's administrators.
3. I stated that I found the content of the citizenship examination (as presented in the study guide I was handed) to be outrageous.
4. I spoke my mind and did not comport myself as a nice little cog in the educational machine.
5. I did not hold the educational party line and sweep all my doubts, reservations, opinions, and individuality under the carpet.
6. I did all this during a conversation with an educational apparatchik (Note: I am using this term because I am slightly ticked off. The person involved may well not deserve the appellation, yet it seems to fit in some respects which I will address later.). and I may have said or done other things to give offense.

Once again, I let my emotions get the best of me and I exercised my right of free speech in a way which had unanticipated consequences for me. So why were my emotions so raw that they ran rampant over good common sense (Don't bite the hand the feeds you).

First off, I've been trying to create a database application for one of the non-profits that I work with. It has not been going well. Years and years of education, experience and lots of natural intelligence and I've been stymied for days, by software that I believe should work but seems intent on proving me wrong. My natural tendencies are to be harsh and judgmental towards myself. So I've been running around frustrated and angry for days.

Second, the facility that we moved to teach in is a boys and girls club. It is new and a nice facility for a boys and girls club, but it is not really set up for adult education classes. When I brought this up to the apparatchik , the response was basically that the institution putting on the class has a partnership with the boys & girls club, which trumps the need for a suitable learning space. This essentially felt like a dismissal of my concerns and led to my comments regarding higher education and especially it's administrators.

Third, the teacher I've been working with handed me a copy of a US Citizenship study guide. I started looking at it and my hackles rose. While I am pretty sure that I could pass a citizenship examination without a lot of preparation, it was clearly evident that a very large percentage of the Americans that I know would likely have difficulty based on the content of my very quick perusal of that study guide. Add that to the fact that at that time I had absolutely no idea how I could meaningfully assist the student I was being asked to help and my mood devolved even further.

Toss in a long time stewing distaste for the direction my beloved nation is heading in, the destruction of the middle class, increasing inequities between the haves and have nots and I spoke without giving thought to just who I was speaking to or for that matter the people who were in earshot of my conversation.

The upshot is that the apparatchik called another partnership upon which the apparatchik laid the task to tell me my volunteer services were no longer desired. Did I mention that the apparatchik, never spoke to the teacher that I've worked with for nearly the past year, nor did the apparatchik, deign to call and speak to me directly regarding my behavior.

I said I would explain my use of the term apparatchik and it boils down to this. The person who declared me "persona non grata" did so based on a few minutes of conversation that quite likely entailed some personal affronts to her role in the world. There was no apparent effort on her part to explore a larger context that this took place in. She neither spoke to the teacher, nor made any effort to speak with me before she arrived at her decision. This including passing off the notification is exactly the behavior I would expect of an apparatchik.

Now I know that the person I've been talking about is not simply a stereo-type. I recognize that she has responsibilities, passions, goals and much more that I am not privy too. Part of that is to protect her job, the programs, the institution, the values systems, she is invested in, hence, the decision to cast me out.

Perhaps, I deserve what has come to pass, yet I am hard pressed to believe it. Without some due process, in which I am given the opportunity to defend or explain my actions, this smacks of an abuse of power.

This not the first nor will it be the last time that my mouth, my emotions, and my weltanschauung will offend someone. Frankly, it happens more often than I like. There are a set of principles that I seem to adhere to pretty consistently throughout my life. I doubt that I can enumerate them all but here are a few:

1. People are more important than institutions.
2. Sweeping crap under the carpet, doesn't get rid of the crap and it still stinks.
3. We are better off being our authentic selves than hiding behind social masks.
4. Education is a poor substitute for learning.
5. Learning comes naturally until education screws it up.
6. Having an education doesn't make one any better than anyone else.
7. Conflict is rarely resolved by ignoring it.
8. Everyone is entitled to respect until they demonstrate that they are unworthy of it.
9. Everyone is entitled to earn respect even after they've squandered what they had.
10. I am frequently in conflict with and contradict myself.
11. Wisdom takes a lifetime.
12. In spite of my desire, I don't have any answers.
13. Too much credit is given for knowing so little when there is so much more to know.
14. Education helped me to become the person I am. It wasn't all bad.
15. Teaching is the art of inspiring a learner to do their best and minimizing as many impediments to that as is possible.
16. Illusions are not significantly different from delusions.

I promised myself that I would stop apologizing for who I am. I apologize when and if I give offense of a personal nature, but I have no desire to remake myself to meet institutional, programmatic, or societal expectations. I've done enough of that throughout my life.

As far as I am concerned, the loss to the class of what I brought to it greatly outweighs what some one gains from declaring me "Persona non grata".

"I really do have to rethink this volunteer thing. It is getting to be a real pain. Oops, did I say that out loud?" Note sarcasm!

60

Turned 60 yesterday. I'd once believed that I wouldn't live past 35. Am quite glad I was a terrible prognosticator.

Read a story emailed by Max Defender today and was grateful for it.

Am really grateful for this life of mine. When I do take a few moments now and then to reflect, I am truly amazed at just how blessed I am. I don't have wealth nor fame nor power but what I've been given makes those things pale by comparison. I have the wind, rainy days, a skunk in my backyard, Gail, Piper, Jeane, and Mom.

I get to experience faith, to give and receive respect, to love and be loved, to recognize the unity of life.

LIFE IS GOOD.

My Bad

Life is rampant with unintended consequences. Upon completing my last blog, I sent an email to Ferndale's mayor, police chief, city administrator, city council members, and the community resource center's coordinator, the last more because I consider her a friend, whom, I know to be deeply interested in our local community. The email was brief and contained three intentions. The first to express appreciation for the time the mayor, police chief and city administrator had put into the town hall meeting they'd held. The second to point them to the blog which I'd written in response to the town hall meeting. The third to hopefully create a positive impression of myself.

The following day I left home early, to find out that I am suffering "fractured tooth syndrome" in my number three molar and to do some volunteer work at the Ferndale Community Resource Center. I returned home to an angry and vocal spouse.

At 10 am, during my absence, the phone rang and a man, who refused to identify himself launched into a tirade at my hapless and unsuspecting wife. As I understand from my wife's report, the voice on the phone was ranting about how we couldn't be who we said we were because our address wasn't even in the county assessor's records. My wife, who had read my blog, was completely unaware of my email and was forced to piece together what the call was about while at the same time enduring the vehemence and rudeness of the caller. After refusing to identify himself, ranting at her, and apparently unwilling to give my wife an opportunity to provide a meaningful response, the caller hung up.

I suppose that the caller thought himself safely anonymous. Caller id and some quick research identified the caller as one of Ferndale's city council members. Shortly after having received my wife's report of events, I called Councilman X. I identified myself by name and stated that I was calling regarding his earlier call to our home. Councilman X, immediately launched into a tirade about how I had to be misrepresenting myself because my home address did not exist. I assured him that it did exist. That the address had been changed nearly a year ago and that I have a letter from the city planning department, explaining that they'd made an error in assigning the original address to our home and that they were changing it.

What is so ludicrous and ironic about this whole address thing is that it began because we were unable to authenticate our address with on-line resources, specifically the US Postal service. A visit to our local postmaster concluded with the postmaster and myself walking across the street to discuss the addressing issue with the city planning department. The city planning office told me that they needed to research the matter and would get back to me on the matter. About a week later I received the following via snail mail, EXHIBIT A. In the letter we received, the city planning department the assured me that they would notify all the appropriate governmental agencies about the change. I, on the other hand, was responsible for notifying the rest of the world about the change of address.

As last year's election season rolled around, I remained quite concerned about this address change and it's potential impact on my ability to vote, so I took a copy of the letter to the county assessor's office and presented it along with an address change form to insure that my right to vote and have my vote count would not be compromised.

I have no explanations why Councilman X, was unable to validate my address with county assessor's office, nor why he was unable to find any record of the address in the city's file as he claimed. I assured him that I'd look into the matter.

Returning to my conversation with the councilman. After numerous attempts to get him to drop the address issue I finally was able to ask him what he thought about what I'd written. "Too wordy" he responded. "I couldn't understand it because it was too wordy". He repeated himself with slightly modified negative phrasing several times concluding with a lecture on what was the "appropriate" manner in which to communicate with public officials. By this time, I was pretty dumbfounded by his entire rant. I told him that my wife wanted to speak with him and he hung up.

Now I would agree with Councilman X, my style can be considered wordy. I prefer to consider it thoughtful, rich in detail, rhythmic and lyrical in tone. In any event, I am sorry that he found it difficult to read and understand. On the other hand, I spent the better part of a day documenting the ideas and rationals that I had in response to the town hall meeting. It was the equivalent of several type written pages I am sure. I used my blog as the medium because it affords me the opportunity to explore my thoughts in an informal and personal manner. I invited Councilman X and others to read my blog as I did not feel obliged to create some formal rebuttal or plan in response to the town hall meeting. I believed that sharing my thoughts as I'd written them would be a sufficient contribution to the community discussion.

In the absence of facts, we often rely on speculation. Subsequent to our conversations with Councilman X, my wife and I speculated on the councilman's apparent lack of education and/or intelligence, the source of the aggressive aspersions he cast at us, his extreme rudeness, his condescension, on and on. In the end, we had to conclude that not knowing Councilman X we had no honest way of judging him, so in the end I concluded, my bad!


PS. Here's an executive summary of the above for Councilman X. "You behaved like an asshole! I trust that there is more to you than that."

Gayland Gump
2127 Poplar Drive
Ferndale, WA 98248-9179
360-671-3077

If you doubt the legitimacy of this address please see EXHIBIT A. If you are a "birther" and actual documentation is meaningless to you then you are way beyond anything I can say or do.

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