The names of the dead are overwhelming.
The victims of wars -- the soldiers and sailors who enlisted and died following orders and a larger cause and the many, many others who were in the path of destruction -- are solemnly remembered and memorialized in the United States at the end of May.
In our grandparents' generation, the returning bodies from World War Two's overseas battles must have felt like the tide of the ocean: unending and incomprehensibly large. The personal and permanent pain to parents and siblings and spouses and children now just a distant memory of those who never met the dead.
Other people in other places more recently endure the pain of war that devastates the entire population: Syria and Yemen and South Sudan and Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya. Their memories are fresh. Their anguish is urgent. And our choices in the United States, most of us insulated and protected altogether from the consequences of war, increase or alleviate their suffering.
If there is a final reckoning of our lives after we pass, will our choices to vote for those who campaign on war or peace weigh in those deliberations?
Political campaigns can seem trivial or absurd or pointless. They are not. The ballots in a church basement or library or firehouse every other November are among the most consequential documents we ever touch. These ballots (however imperfectly translated into the public will) always carry with them the weight of life of death. More war -- brutal and horrifying and a dark stain on our collective conscious -- or a path to peace.
It's easier to choose war. It's easier to fight an enemy than find common ground. Perhaps we're hardwired that way. But it is a choice -- personal and private in each of our own hearts and minds that become our governments formed from our choices whether and how to vote.
The best evidence of civilization is overcoming war. Choosing peace. It is difficult and frustrating and in some ways counter-intuitive to choose the ambiguity of permanent negotiation over the clarity of conflict. The millions who might die or suffer from continued military conflict, both American and overseas, deserve our full attention and empathy every single time we are blessed with the opportunity to select our political leaders. We best remember the dead when we vote for peace.
Tuesday, May 28, 2019
Thursday, May 23, 2019
Creating new county and state parks and forests as rural economic development
Two big ideas:
Rural areas need economic development - and city-driven wealth generated by high education and high services isn’t the right fit. Tourism, however, which remains a growth industry could be a good strategy. So what do rural areas have that people want to pay to visit? Nature. A lot of it. How to expand and market that nature? Create and expand parks - not just our famous national parks but state and county parks as well.
A related idea is the power and necessity of planting a trillion trees - those great carbon-eating machines - on our planet to combat the devastation of climate change. The stark math of how much pollution we have pumped into our thin atmosphere and how much we have to somehow pull out is chilling. Trees are one of the tools in our arsenal to sustain life as we know it. And planting them at scale - a trillion of them - fits the scope of the challenge.
Since only half of us are inclined to attack climate change (at least in the US) and rural political leaders tend to feel even more skeptical of the value of attacking climate change, our campaign to earn their support to create new county parks with millions and millions of untouched trees and plants has to be an economic development strategy. Which I suspect pencils out in terms of wealth generation from increased visitors but it would be better to have data behind the pitch. And we need to sell the hundred thousand or so local and county and state leaders on implementing their own park-driven tourism development plan. Billions of federal funding for local forests wouldn’t hurt.
These ideas inspired by reading Richard Powers recent novel Overstory. I recommend it.
Rural areas need economic development - and city-driven wealth generated by high education and high services isn’t the right fit. Tourism, however, which remains a growth industry could be a good strategy. So what do rural areas have that people want to pay to visit? Nature. A lot of it. How to expand and market that nature? Create and expand parks - not just our famous national parks but state and county parks as well.
A related idea is the power and necessity of planting a trillion trees - those great carbon-eating machines - on our planet to combat the devastation of climate change. The stark math of how much pollution we have pumped into our thin atmosphere and how much we have to somehow pull out is chilling. Trees are one of the tools in our arsenal to sustain life as we know it. And planting them at scale - a trillion of them - fits the scope of the challenge.
Since only half of us are inclined to attack climate change (at least in the US) and rural political leaders tend to feel even more skeptical of the value of attacking climate change, our campaign to earn their support to create new county parks with millions and millions of untouched trees and plants has to be an economic development strategy. Which I suspect pencils out in terms of wealth generation from increased visitors but it would be better to have data behind the pitch. And we need to sell the hundred thousand or so local and county and state leaders on implementing their own park-driven tourism development plan. Billions of federal funding for local forests wouldn’t hurt.
These ideas inspired by reading Richard Powers recent novel Overstory. I recommend it.
Saturday, May 18, 2019
Wilmette Library Trustee report - my attempt at local public service transparency
Welcome back to my old blog...I'm restarting this one as an attempt to bring some transparency to my service as a Trustee of the Wilmette Public Library.
About once a month, probably before each Board meeting, I intend to post my thoughts and comments on the upcoming agenda. We'll see how I do.
An interesting reason why I am doing it this way on a blog is because it is illegal for an elected official to email his or her colleagues with responses and ideas about the upcoming agenda item. The Open Meetings Act requires all public deliberation to be done in public, but that makes for the natural collaboration in a group (which is what elected officials really do -- group decision-making) really difficult. Technology allows people to communicate largely in writing in really convenient times, and allows the public and taxpayers to follow along when it is convenient for them. Unfortunately, state law hasn't quite caught up to this so we are stuck collaborating only in person and that's a challenge to find the time to do that as a volunteer (at least, it's a challenge for me). Thus, the blog.
So, two years and halfway in to my term as a Library Trustee, here are my thoughts.
1. We have a huge capital reserve (called a Special Reserve Fund) and a huge operating reserve. Our annual budget is about $5M and we have $17M or so in the bank, about evenly distributed between a capital fund and an operating surplus. The library has been raising more money than it spent every year for a long time and I hope this year we finally end this practice. I also hope we can move some of our annual operating budget into the special reserve fund by allocating budget items from the operating budget to the capital budget (basically, if state law allows the library to pay for something like building maintenance out of our special reserve fund, then we should). That will reduce our annual budget and allow us to reduce our property tax levy.
Every month the Board approves all the checks written in the last month. The agenda for the next board meeting is on the Library website here. A few checks, to me, look like they could be spent out of our capital fund, not the operating fund, that come out of the Building Maintenance Contracts or Building Maintenance line items ($2100 for Hill Mechanical Services, $1100 for J.T. Home Refurbishing), a Security System Maintenance line item ($2100 for Central Technology), computer equipment since "equipment" is an authorized use of the capital fund under state law as I understand it ($7500 for Cooperative Computer Service) and some miscellaneous equipment maintenance and equipment furnishings paid from what looks like a Chase card for about $11,000. All these are on Item 5 of the agenda which I hope you can download here.
I've asked for clarification on whether we can use our abundant capital funds to pay for these expenses. My read of state law is that it is a Library policy whether to assign these expenses to our capital Special Reserve Fund or whether to pay them from our general operating budget, since we set up our own Special Reserve Fund and state law is fairly open as to what you can use to pay for it (so long as it is capital related and not something like a book or a heating bill). I hope to get a clear answer soon and hopefully the Board will determine that we ought to pay our capital expenses from our capital fund.
2. Interesting proposal to keep a current contractual relationship between the Kenilworth Public Library District (which doesn't have a library) with Winnetka/Northfield and Wilmette. The proposed cost for Kenilworth taxpayers to be treated as residents for both Wilmette and Winnetka/Northfield is $282,889 a year, plus inflation. Why that number? I don't know. I love the idea of intergovernmental cooperation. But I'd like some more background as to whether that's the right amount. It's on the agenda for approval next week, which seems pretty fast to me. Hopefully we can push off a final decision until next month at least to get more discussion and background. By the way, I'd love to use the Kenilworth Metra station as a library facility, since the ticket agent has been pulled from this historic old station. Would be nice to have a library staffer there to sell tickets and check out books. Right now it is unstaffed and that's not ideal. I'd like that to be part of the discussion and the contract. You can read the proposed contract as Attachment 10 and hopefully download it here.
I'm sure there's more, but getting some thoughts out early Saturday morning in writing before the Board meeting Tuesday night will hopefully advance our public deliberation.
About once a month, probably before each Board meeting, I intend to post my thoughts and comments on the upcoming agenda. We'll see how I do.
An interesting reason why I am doing it this way on a blog is because it is illegal for an elected official to email his or her colleagues with responses and ideas about the upcoming agenda item. The Open Meetings Act requires all public deliberation to be done in public, but that makes for the natural collaboration in a group (which is what elected officials really do -- group decision-making) really difficult. Technology allows people to communicate largely in writing in really convenient times, and allows the public and taxpayers to follow along when it is convenient for them. Unfortunately, state law hasn't quite caught up to this so we are stuck collaborating only in person and that's a challenge to find the time to do that as a volunteer (at least, it's a challenge for me). Thus, the blog.
So, two years and halfway in to my term as a Library Trustee, here are my thoughts.
1. We have a huge capital reserve (called a Special Reserve Fund) and a huge operating reserve. Our annual budget is about $5M and we have $17M or so in the bank, about evenly distributed between a capital fund and an operating surplus. The library has been raising more money than it spent every year for a long time and I hope this year we finally end this practice. I also hope we can move some of our annual operating budget into the special reserve fund by allocating budget items from the operating budget to the capital budget (basically, if state law allows the library to pay for something like building maintenance out of our special reserve fund, then we should). That will reduce our annual budget and allow us to reduce our property tax levy.
Every month the Board approves all the checks written in the last month. The agenda for the next board meeting is on the Library website here. A few checks, to me, look like they could be spent out of our capital fund, not the operating fund, that come out of the Building Maintenance Contracts or Building Maintenance line items ($2100 for Hill Mechanical Services, $1100 for J.T. Home Refurbishing), a Security System Maintenance line item ($2100 for Central Technology), computer equipment since "equipment" is an authorized use of the capital fund under state law as I understand it ($7500 for Cooperative Computer Service) and some miscellaneous equipment maintenance and equipment furnishings paid from what looks like a Chase card for about $11,000. All these are on Item 5 of the agenda which I hope you can download here.
I've asked for clarification on whether we can use our abundant capital funds to pay for these expenses. My read of state law is that it is a Library policy whether to assign these expenses to our capital Special Reserve Fund or whether to pay them from our general operating budget, since we set up our own Special Reserve Fund and state law is fairly open as to what you can use to pay for it (so long as it is capital related and not something like a book or a heating bill). I hope to get a clear answer soon and hopefully the Board will determine that we ought to pay our capital expenses from our capital fund.
2. Interesting proposal to keep a current contractual relationship between the Kenilworth Public Library District (which doesn't have a library) with Winnetka/Northfield and Wilmette. The proposed cost for Kenilworth taxpayers to be treated as residents for both Wilmette and Winnetka/Northfield is $282,889 a year, plus inflation. Why that number? I don't know. I love the idea of intergovernmental cooperation. But I'd like some more background as to whether that's the right amount. It's on the agenda for approval next week, which seems pretty fast to me. Hopefully we can push off a final decision until next month at least to get more discussion and background. By the way, I'd love to use the Kenilworth Metra station as a library facility, since the ticket agent has been pulled from this historic old station. Would be nice to have a library staffer there to sell tickets and check out books. Right now it is unstaffed and that's not ideal. I'd like that to be part of the discussion and the contract. You can read the proposed contract as Attachment 10 and hopefully download it here.
I'm sure there's more, but getting some thoughts out early Saturday morning in writing before the Board meeting Tuesday night will hopefully advance our public deliberation.
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