Library Matters

The Point Interface management put up a nice reminder today about leaving only magazines at the library's magazine exchange cart.  And I didn't even request the post, although I'm grateful for it.  Two Saturdays ago, there was a real plethora (singular? plural?) of catalogs amidst the magazines, but this past Saturday when I stopped by, there was not a single catalog.  There also weren't very many magazines, so I don't know whether that means that everybody is scooping them up as quickly as they appear or that people have stopped bringing them in to exchange.

There is a note on the library door that says something to the effect of people not leaving reading donations without talking to the librarians.  BUT, it is not necessary to talk to the librarians to leave magazines on the magazine exchange cart. But, you don't want to leave books without talking to them about that.

So far, the magazine exchange seems to be working well, and that speaks well for all of us as good citizens! 

Library Charity

"Bring me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to be free."  This is not the slogan of the Point Roberts Library's magazine exchange.  One might think that putting signs on the cart indicating that it is a 'magazine exchange' and 'free magazines' would make it clear that this is not a place to leave your airline brochures for travel to Turkey.  Doubtless some people are going to Turkey this year, but it seems very unlikely to me that they would ever think to go to the Library's magazine exchange cart to find information about such a trip.  You go to the magazine exchange cart to find a copy of Wired, or The National Geographic, O, Smithsonian, Harper's, etc.

I went by the library today to do my weekly (when I'm here) tidying-up.  And what did I find today?  Well, maybe it's the Christmas season and people have lost their wits; or maybe it was the very cold weather last week that caused no blood to flow to their brains.  What I found were a lot of old newspapers and a spontaneous outpouring of catalogs, particularly from LL Bean and Land's End.  Maybe a dozen of one of them.  Some person (the LL Bean contributor, I think) had carefully cut out the back-page mailing label in exactly the same way on all those catalogs, making it clear that these weren't accidentally dropped off at the library.  The other set of catalogs apparently came in packages because they had no printed labels requiring removal.  Just a little reminder, folks: we all get those catalogs.  We don't need to pass them around.  What the contributors of catalogs might need to do is contact the web site that permits you to request that companies stop sending you catalogs. 

There are some people, I guess, who think that leaving something in a recycle zone automatically gives value to objects that have no value.  Do these people also give their worn out underwear to clothing drives?  Keep your catalogs to yourself, I ask.  Politely, if possible; like the Grinch, if not.  No more difficult for you to cart them to the dump than it is for me.

Civic Matters (and a Little Weather)

Yesterday, it was supposed to be rainy, but the late morning was pretty sunny, with big blue sky and big puffy white cloud.  And it was even pretty warm, relative to November and all that.  I came back from cross the border around 2 p.m. and suggested to Ed that we put the tree sweaters on the first two trees.  (There is about 35 meters of tree sweater currently waiting to be mounted upon the dogwood and maple tree.)  But I had a couple of other things to do, so he went up on the roof to sweep leaves, while I did the dishes.  And then, ten minutes later, it started raining hard.  I went outside and saw that the sky was very dark, overwhelmingly dark, and while I stood there, I saw a flash of lightning, quickly followed by thunder.  Ed came down off the roof, we went indoors, and the rain poured down and the thunder and lightning continued close by for maybe five minutes.  And then, out of the sky, but of course it felt like out of nowhere, big balls of hail started pouring down, quickly covering the porch and all the pathways.  Five minutes maybe, maybe more.  And then for the rest of the day, it was very, very cold outside.  I guess you drop a ton or so of ice in your yard, it chills everything down quite a bit.  A surprising day.  [Another view of how winter is coming at us here.]  [This is Ed's photo, not mine, though.]

Then, today, I went to the library, partly to do my tidying work on the magazine exchange cart.  Sadly, I found five catalogs (as compared to three last Saturday), and probably a dozen pieces of travel literature (clearly not magazines under the definition I’d think we’d be using).  I confiscated the catalogues and some of the travel literature that was clearly just commercial stuff.  But I’m open to ideas of how to communicate to magazine exchangers what we ought to be aiming for in order not to have this become overflowing with stuff that nobody wants.

Finally, this coming Monday, a couple of County Very Important People are coming up to hear us or probably for us to hear them talk about the septic system inspection program.  (Community Center, 7 p.m.)  The town is rife with various rumors about how this program is being conducted, mostly involving favoritism for low-standard inspections by the commercial inspectors.  The County’s failure to set fee standards/ranges makes this an almost inevitable rumor, of course.  Washington doesn’t have car inspections like many states do, so maybe this is how it learns the hard way how to do mandatory inspections.  It does seem like it would be obvious that you’d want to eliminate or at least minimize the obvious conflicts of interest.

The Taxpayers Association has come up with a list of questions that they have sent to the County Councilwoman and County Counsel person in hopes that they will have some answers.  Mark Robbins, who is heading up the TA right now, put together the list from a member discussion last week and I suggested to him that it might be useful to get the questions out to the public ahead of time, as well.  So here they are:

1.  Not enough time given to property owners.  Need blanket extension (not consideration of individual requests.  NB:  The notification by the Health Department was issued in October, a few weeks after most of the many part-time residents had already closed up their summer cottages for the winter.
2.  Annual inspections are too frequent and unnecessarily burdensome.
3.  The inspection  regime is not calibrated to usage or presence of inhabitants.
4.  There  may be conflicts of interest in requiring inspections by private inspectors, some of whom may be contractors with an interest in making repairs or replacing septic systems.  The County employs inspectors for other purposes; why not for septic system?
5.  If the system is to depend on private inspectors, the County should regulate the allowable fee schedule for inspections.
6.  Couldn’t older systems be grandfathered in, at least to some degree related to usage and severity of the deficiency?
7.  Isn’t it way past due to think about innovations that would reduce demand on septic systems, including composting toilets (are these allowed in Whatcom County?) and gray water systems?
8.  County ordinances and health regulations that, if really unavoidable, will require huge capital expenditures by property owners for new, above ground septic systems, ought not to be imposed prior to establishing a fund or mechanism for low interest loans and assistance to people who cannot afford the repairs that will be necessary to remain in their homes.  If there is a real environmental and public health problem, it has developed over decades; so why does it have to be fixed in months?
 9.  What is the experience of other Washington counties in meeting the state mandate on sanitary septic systems?
10. Can the county help Point Roberts (and similar unincorporated communities) to analyze the costs and benefits of endless individual investments in inspections and repairs vs community investment in a sewage and treatment system?

If we got answers/explanations from our visitors on all ten of those, I’d be impressed, but we can at least hope they will come prepared to address our concerns and not just to announce the wisdom of their previous actions.  A good turnout would be helpful.

Loose Ends

The Magazine Exchange:  Kris, who runs the library, has made everything better.  She obtained a rolling cart from the main library and the magazines for exchange can be left on the cart and the librarians will take it in when the library closes and bring it out when the library opens.   That limits the exchange a bit I suppose since it means only during the library opening times, but better than nothing, and actually very good.  I told Kris today that I would check it at least once a week while I am on the Point to make sure that it is not overflowing and to prune if necessary.  This ought, however, not to turn into extra work for the librarians, so it would be a good idea for everyone who uses it to attend to the tidiness factor, as well. 

The Community Events Sign:  Well, the roof is not yet there, but there are an awful lot of trusses for something that is only about a five-foot span.  I imagine the roof will be made of granite or marble or something like that in order to bear down sufficiently on those trusses.

Economic Development Plan #3001:  I had seen this  For Sale sign frequently, but somehow never quite focused on the hotel plan possibilities.  A few years ago, there was talk of a race track on this property, I believe.  How much more interesting even would a hotel be, right there across from the post office and the USA gas station, and adjoining the community events sign!  Lots of lots and buildings for sale in Point Roberts right now.  Perhaps many hotels as well as B and B’s, motels and maybe even boarding houses.  Transitory Housing R Us. 

Read My Magazines!

I am a reader of magazines, feeling bad about the future when they will be only on the computer screen.  I don’t mind reading books on my Kindle, like it even, but I don’t like reading magazines on my Kindle, although my Kindle is not the kind, I think, that reads magazines or newspapers.  Maybe I could learn to like it, but I have tried reading them on my computer screen and I just don’t like it.  It’s tiresome, and a magazine you have subscribed to by choice is rarely tiresome.  (Although The Atlantic has become so, except for James Fallows.)

Here in beautiful downtown Point Roberts, we have no book store with a terrific magazine rack so if you are a magazine fan you may have actually to subscribe.  I subscribe to The New Yorker and Harpers and Washington Monthly and Mother Jones and, up until next month, to Foreign Affairs which has turned out to be too dull even for me.  Actually, if you subscribe to The New Yorker you really don’t need to subscribe to anything else because it comes about 50 of 52 weeks each year and there is always one on the table that you haven’t read.  We have boxes of New Yorkers from the 80’s that we didn’t have time to read during our working days and that we brought with us when we moved up here, but the current New Yorkers are keeping us too busy to work on the backlog.  The New Yorker will sell you an external drive that has every New Yorker ever published.  I plan to be buried with this drive so that I will always have something to read.

Up until this week, I have taken my completely-read New Yorkers and Harpers and all the rest over to the Community Center where, in the hall outside the library, a couple of boxes sit on a bench.  This is the magazine exchange and you can put your magazines there when you are through with them and somebody else will take them.  I’m in and out of that hallway and I’ve never seen my New Yorkers sit there for long.  Sometimes they are gone just in the time that I am inside the library checking out a book.  This is a great recycling/exchange/community service. 

I  occasionally take a magazine, but mostly I am a leaver of New Yorkers.  I take few magazines from the boxes largely because I am trying to keep up with those New Yorkers.  Today, when I went to drop off one New Yorker and one Harpers, a sign informed me that my magazines were not to be left there and if I wanted to donate material to the library, I should talk to the librarian.  But I never thought I was donating “material to the library.”  I was recycling magazines with my fellow readers/residents.

In the library, I spoke to the head librarian who told me that this new policy had nothing to do with the library but was, in fact, a decision by the Parks Board, a group of five whom we elect and whose job it is to care for the Community Center and some of the parks around.  This is what passes for local government here, as almost all the rest of our government is located down in Bellingham with the County.

While discussing this unfortunate turn of events with the librarian, I noticed that one of the members of the Parks Board was in fact sitting at a nearby computer.  ‘What’s the deal?’ I asked.  He mumbled on about the cost of recycling old magazines and the fact that the boxes were not tidy.  People, apparently, left magazines on the benches and then the magazines flung themselves on the floor. ‘It is,’ he concluded, ‘An aesthetic issue.’

Well, perhaps the five members of the Parks Board are particularly highly qualified to make aesthetic decisions and perhaps we were well-briefed on their aesthetic theories before we voted for them.  Nevertheless, I think they might have asked those of us who use the magazine exchange about the value of this service and how that service weighed when placed on the balance scale with their aesthetics.  Or might even have come to the community and suggested that maybe we needed to think about another way to handle the magazine exchange. Point-Interface would be a particularly good place to leave such a message, to begin such a dialogue.  It seems just a tad high-handed voting in this new policy without any community discussion.  We have time here.

Now, in Los Angeles, nobody is going to discuss something like abolishing a magazine exchange at a local library with the community.  That’s the whole thing about living even in a moderate-sized city.  But in a place with only 1400 or so residents, perhaps some more respect could be shown to the residents from the government.   

Magazine subscribers and exchangers, Unite!  At the very least, we could all go to the next Parks Board meeting and exchange our magazines while they work through their agenda.