My baseline question is this…. WHY is the staff so heavily invested ? The constant ‘threat’ of getting a referendum in before the school district does, and then the revelation that the school district is not thinking of a referendum next year makes the staff statement beyond duplicitous.
How are you to know who to believe?

How is the Council to deal with that level of misinformation from the most senior staff?

I am concerned that there seems to be a rush by the City to get big bonding bills done before the School District comes forward with another school. Perhaps some discussion with the School is appropriate.

All indications are that the City is intent on pushing through a big, new facility. I haven’t heard any discussion of the fire department moving out and leaving the police there. In fact, it appears as is the City is still moving full full speed ahead with the Task Force’s majority opinion.

Am I wrong in so thinking?

I don’t know if you feel it would have been more appropriate for me to present my report first, instead of after the task force report. I personally don’t think that would have been the thing to do—so I gave the task force the time to present their report, then simply offered my report for consideration. I have never said anything about discrediting the work the task force did. Quite the contrary, by serving on the task force I was able to learn a lot about the safety center issues. I just happened to arrive at a different conclusion after digesting the same information.

Perhaps there will be another task force assembled to look into the issue again. If so, I would highly recommend that they not operate under consensus and that the city council give a defined budget range for them to work with.

I don’t hold you responsible for all this, Ray. Obviously, the Task Force model or the Council’s charge to the Task Force were not sufficient and you chose one way to get more information on the table.

Now that your view has been championed by the Chamber and NDDC and several other options have also been thrown into the mix, the result is that the Council has no clear recommendation to guide it and we have been forced to revisit and rediscuss what the Task Force did.

With all that in place, it was clear that there was no room in the task force committee for a voice that was promoting an alternate direction. I suppose I could have refused to concur with the task force and been a hold out forever….until the group disbanded. Instead I prepared what I believe was a thoughtful minority report and presented it to the city council at the same time the task force report was presented.

In my mind a minority report is very similar to a disenting judicial opinion in an appellate court decision. It is important for judges to present disenting opinions. For me it was important for me to put forth my ideas to the taxpayers of the city.

For the 20+ years that I have been in town we have talked about more parking downtown. Part of the problem lies in the fact that people (including merchants) don’t want to walk very far. So, putting additional parking in one part of downtown doesn’t benefit the other side.

The parking spaces that the library is proposing to take away are spots that can’t be easily replaced. If those spaces are moved to Washington or further, people would still use the spaces for the library, but those spaces would be lost to the downtown.

Various calculations have been performed to identify how much parking an expanded library would need. I’d say those spaces should be considered part of the cost of the library. However, what if the library expansion provides more parking than required for library patrons? Those “excess” spaces could be considered an additional project or the library project could be thought of differently as a hybrid project.

David, Sean is right about the College libraries – I have nothing to add to his very clear description of the differences.

And, Sean is right about perceptions and expectations of parking. The 10 year old Walker parking study found people willing to walk 1/2 block to their destination – that’s not much. We have planned for cars and we’ve come to rely on the convenience. The challenge for downtown is we presume parking is shared among businesses, rather than each building providing its own. This is good because it keeps downtown compact, limits the amount of parking, and generally helps maintain the character if the historic core. On the other hand, if you’re expecting easy drive up and drive through access, you’ll be disappointed or frustrated.

You can’t really think that we have a shortage of downtown parking because we require too much parking at other non-downtown stores!?

Well, yes. There is no natural law of parking here; we need as much parking as we expect/demand. In the case of the downtown, the problem is not literally that there is no place to park — except during DJJD, Washington and Water Streets are rarely filled — but simply that we don’t find what’s available to be convenient enough. Our standard of convenience is dictated by our parking experience elsewhere (like Target).

It seems reasonable to conclude that a parking facility is part of the “cost” of a new library.

I’d like to see Betsey comment here, but it’s not. Parking seems to be considered already a problem. At most, we should be considering the loss of 20-or-so spots on East 3rd Street as part of the Library project. (Betsey states that the proposed plan is to also eliminate to 3rd and Washington lot — this is in only in one building concept; it is possible to do the necessary expansion without eliminating that surface lot.) Though I don’t know that there’s any tracking of what parking is for what purpose, I believe very few Library users park on Division. If the Library is providing parking space for other businesses’ use, then I don’t think it’s fair to consider that a cost of the Library.

Has there been any effort to make the colleges’ libraries more accessible rather than building more library?

Lynne Young and Margit Johnson can and have spoken effectively to the Council as to why this is an overly simplistic idea. The college libraries and the public libraries are wildly different, in terms of collection and — especially — in terms of type of service. Much of what the NPL does is children’s programming (that the current facility cannot accommodate). They provide access and books for people with limited income and limited English proficiency. The public library is more than a simple warehouse of books, and in these areas, the college libraries are not suited to serve as well as the NPL.