Salem Political Snark

Salem River Crossing project about to get a well-deserved death

Last night the City Council held a work session on the Salem River Crossing project, often termed the Third Bridge. Or, the Billion Dollar Boondoggle.

I watched some of the work session via a Facebook feed. My impression of what transpired fits with the headline of a Statesman Journal story, "Salem third bridge: City Council shows few signs of advancing proposal as deadline nears."

And why would the nine councilors show a sign that suddenly they were all in on this project? 

Each of the six progressives on the City Council was elected after making a campaign promise to oppose wasting many hundreds of millions of dollars on a bridge that is unneeded, unwanted, and unpaid-for.

Since there are only eight wards in Salem, and they have roughly equal population (the Mayor also is on the council), the majority of voters in three-fourths of Salem have said "no" to the Salem River Crossing. And I strongly doubt that anything said at the work session changed any minds on the City Council.

So likely the Third Bridge will be buried for good on February 11 when it's expected the City Council will vote on whether to address legal rulings by the Land Use Board of Appeals that caused the project to be put on hold.

Since there's no good reason to keep the Salem River Crossing project alive, and many reasons to kill it, it would be a major surprise if it survives. Proponents of the bridge are doing their last-minute best, though, as noted by a Salem Reporter story, "Salem bridge advocates work to save project from collapse."

Listening to part of the work session, it seemed clear that there wasn't much appetite for building a smaller, less expensive bridge without all of the ancillary bells and whistles (metaphorically speaking, of course). The screenshot above from the City of Salem staff report for the work session shows that the actual bridge is just the tip of the iceberg of the Salem River Crossing project.

Councilor Kaser asked if it was possible to basically only build the bridge. But this would dump a lot of traffic into West Salem without the Marine Drive construction and other improvements. So congestion likely would end up being worse, not better. 

And it's an open secret that the Salem River Crossing never was intended to merely be a way to reduce rush hour congestion between downtown and West Salem. Backers of the bridge have stressed that it is needed to handle regional traffic. Meaning, cars and trucks passing through Salem on their way elsewhere (like to the coast, or the Portland area).

So Salem citizens were expected to foot most of the bill for a bridge project that, in large part, benefitted people who lived somewhere else. Yes, tolls were planned on both the new bridge and the two current bridges. But obviously regular commuters across the bridges would pay more overall than occasional bridge users.

Thus part of the reason I say the Third Bridge's death is well-deserved is because of how much duplicity, scheming, misinformation, and flat-out lies bridge proponents have engaged in during the dozen years or so of Salem River Crossing planning.

Most recently, the Breakfast on Bikes blogger has done an admirable job of pointing out some of the most egregious misstatements put forward by City of Salem staff in the above-mentioned Salem River Crossing Q & A document. I shared a summary of the Breakfast on Bikes critiques in "City of Salem staff and Mayor Bennett are spinning Third Bridge facts."

The beginning of the bridge project also was marked by disturbing goings-on. There was much more happening behind the scenes than this graphic of how the Salem River Crossing Task Force voted back in 2012 lets on. (See page 6 of the Q & A.)

What's immediately evident is bad enough. There were 21 members of the task force voting. No alternative got a majority of those members. A 2018 Salem Weekly editorial, "Who's responsible for the 3rd bridge debacle?",  dug deeper into the early Salem River Crossing machinations. 

I'll share the editorial in its entirety, because it is important for people to understand why the bridge project ended up being such a mess.

Posted by SW Editorial Board | Jun 20, 2018

Get ready for it.

According to Federal regulations, if work is not begun on the Salem River Crossing “Preferred Alternative” by September 30, 2019, all of the Federal funds that were spent on the planning process have to be repaid to the Federal Highway Administration.

We are talking here about around $8 million dollars that could have built sidewalks and pedestrian crossings and bike lanes and street improvements in Salem.

If this happens, you will no doubt see arrows launched at the five Salem City Councilors who have effectively blocked the project from going forward. They will be vilified by 3rd Bridge enthusiasts for our having to send precious transportation dollars back to the Federal government.

But if this happens, who’s really responsible?

For the answer to that question you need to go back to August 12, 2012, and the final meeting of the Salem River Crossing Task Force.

According to the official ODOT SRC website, the purpose of the Task Force was to “provide a balanced representation of stakeholder interests.” In August of 2012 the group had been meeting for nearly six years to study traffic problems and to investigate alternatives. At their final meeting the Task Force was asked to vote on their preference for going forward with several variations on a new Salem river crossing, or to not proceed — the so-called “No Build” alternative.

In the final vote of the 22 members present, none of the “build” options received a majority of the vote. Alternative 4D, the $800 million monstrosity that was later rejected by the Salem City Council, received the most votes with 10.

But seven of the Task Force members voted for “No Build’ and one member who had to leave early also voiced her strong preference for “No Build” earlier in the meeting, making a total of eight. It must be noted that all of the representatives of Salem neighborhood associations voted for “No Build.”

And who voted for the “build” options?

Six were staff members representing local governments and three represented business interests, including one who had to declare a conflict of interest because of property he owned in the path of the “build” options. We should question why these bureaucrats and businessmen were stacking the Task Force to begin with. Was the Task Force designed to reach a foregone conclusion to build a 3rd Bridge? To many it seems that way.

Whether that was true or not, it is clear that the Task Force never came together on a strong consensus to move forward on a “preferred alternative” for the 3rd Bridge. After six years of meetings, nearly all of the ordinary citizens on the Task Force remained unconvinced that the project was viable.

Darlene Strozut, who represented the Highland Neighborhood Association on the Task Force, spoke for all of the neighborhood associations when she summed up the meeting this way: “All neighborhood association representatives voted for either no build or widening/improving the current bridges. Assuming none of those have changed their minds, going forward with a recommendation not supported by any of the impacted neighborhood representatives, plus no financing plan, seems unrealistic.”

It should be clear from this that the Salem River Crossing project went off the rails six years ago, at the final meeting of the Task Force, and that should have been the end of it.

Instead, the bureaucrats and business interests who pushed it from the start put it back on track.

The recommendation of the Task Force, such as it was, went to the project Oversight Team, comprised of elected officials.  Included there were long-time 3rd Bridge enthusiasts like  former Salem City Councilor Dan Clem and Marion County Commissioner Sam Brentano. They chose to ignore the fact that it was mostly only the bureaucrats and the business interests who wanted a 3rd Bridge.

They then proceeded to waste millions of our Federal dollars on grandiose plans that had never attracted strong support from the citizens who would be asked to pay for them.

If we end up having to repay those millions to the Feds, they will be the ones responsible for this wasteful debacle.

Here's how to tell Howard Schultz "Don't run for president"

If Howard Schultz, the ex-CEO of Starbucks, runs for president as an independent, there's too high a risk that he will siphon off enough votes to enable Donald Trump to win a second term in 2020. 

So here's how to tell Schultz, "Don't run for president." 

There's a Contact Us link on his website, though it isn't very obvious, being at the bottom of the site pages. That's why I'm sharing the link -- to make it easier for people to urge Schultz to hold off on his vanity presidential campaign. It's https://www.howardschultz.com/contact-us

Naturally you can say whatever you like in your message to Schultz. This is what I said:

Please don't run for president as an independent. If you do, there's too great a chance you'll make Trump the winner in 2020. And if you do, I promise that I won't ever enter another Starbucks, and I'll urge everyone I know to do the same.

If you need persuading that Schultz could tilt the 2020 election to Trump, read a New York Times opinion piece, "Howard Schultz, Please Don't Run for President." Excerpt:

There are policies that could potentially break the two-party stranglehold on our politics. Ranked-choice voting, which Maine used for the 2018 congressional elections, lets voters select candidates in order of preference. One by one, the candidates with the fewest votes are eliminated. Their supporters’ votes are apportioned to those voters’ next-highest choice, until someone emerges with a majority.

If Schultz were serious about challenging party monopolies he might invest some of his fortune in efforts to pass similar reforms elsewhere.

Absent such changes, his candidacy would threaten to siphon away enough votes to give Trump a second term.

In 2015 and 2016, Bloomberg, a billionaire businessman whose politics are much like Schultz’s, considered mounting an independent campaign for president. His team looked closely at poll data and focus groups, and found he’d be potentially competitive only in blue states. “All of the results were very consistent,” Howard Wolfson, Bloomberg’s political adviser told me. “An independent with Mike’s profile would have merely resulted in Trump’s election.”

City of Salem staff and Mayor Bennett are spinning Third Bridge facts

It's unfortunate that in advance of next Wednesday's City Council work session on the Salem River Crossing project, a.k.a. the Third Bridge, councilors and the public are being fed a bunch of pseudo-facts that run the gamut from clearly false to questionable.

As noted in a recent post of mine, even though in recent years the Salem City Council has shifted from being dominated by conservatives to a 6-3 progressive majority, the unpaid volunteer councilors and mayor are dependent on City of Salem staff -- which includes employees who have been working on the Salem River Crossing for a long time, and thus are deeply committed to it.

Having worked in state government (health planning) as an executive service manager back in the 70's and 80's, I'm well aware of how staff can control volunteer boards/councils/committees, etc. via the information and policy options provided to them. 

But this doesn't make it right, especially when the consequences of misleading information are so massive, as in the case of the billion dollar (with financing costs, inflation, and contingencies) Third Bridge.

So the highly knowledgeable Salem Breakfast on Bikes blogger, who focuses on transportation and land use issues, has been doing a great service with his series of posts about how City of Salem staff and Mayor Bennett are doing their best to put a positive spin on what I, and others, like to call the Billion Dollar Boondoggle.

Hopefully city councilors will pay close attention to the Breakfast on Bikes posts, which I've listed below along with excerpts from each. Together they paint a disturbing portrait of how misleading certain Third Bridge information being provided to citizens and city councilors is.

Mayor Spins SRC at State of the City Address -- updated. 
Yesterday the Mayor gave an annual "State of the City" address, and the Mayor lamented difficulties on the Salem Rivercrossing and tried to rally supporters in the face of increasingly doubtful prospects for the SRC. It was spin. With gloom-and-doom alarmism, he shaded matters to put his case in the best light and verged sometimes on outright misrepresentation.

...To say that we need the SRC to be "resilient" is to misunderstand the opportunity cost: If we spend a billion dollars on a giant new bridge and highway, that's money we will not likely be spending on other valuable good things. Local taxes and funding sources would be necessary in addition to whatever State or Federal funding somehow materializes (and the official stance is that the SRC is a low priority for State or Federal funding). There would be debt that would affect the resiliency of local government, also. We already have a gap between revenues and budgets.

...Finally, the SRC would harm bicycle connectivity throughout the whole city, induce more driving throughout, increase speeds, and in no way helps us "nurture" bicycling. The Mayor plainly does not know what he is talking about. The SRC is in most every way harmful for bicycling. The SRC would also suck up huge amounts of discretionary transportation spending and eliminate important funding sources for sidewalks, bike lanes, and crosswalks.

The SRC's Disconnect on Decongestion Pricing.
And here is what might be the single most important take-away. This chart isn't from the SRC. But it is drawn from the table just below, table 5 in this "Revenue Projections" memo. The table is from the SRC's own materials, and the data the chart expresses comes from the SRC's own internal assumptions.


As soon as we toll the bridges - poof! All our problems with congestion go away on the existing bridges.

If we build a new bridge and toll it and the others, we will have speedy crossing on all three.  As soon as we toll, any new bridge becomes wholly superfluous. Tolling forces the question: Why do we also need a bridge?

We could think of tolling then as "decongestion pricing," as tolling looks to be highly effective with decongestant action. And if we use tolling not to fund a new bridge, but as a policy measure to manage demand better, even implemented with variable rates so that off-peak crossing is cheaper, then it is obvious to think of it as decongestion pricing.

Apart from the projections and congestion relief, the memo also clearly recommended tolling: "Tolls are the fairest option."

...So: The SRC recommends tolling as fair, and the SRC shows tolling dramatically reduces congestion.

Decongestion pricing should be at the center of our analysis, not building a new bridge.

But decongestion pricing is largely erased from any analysis other than the context of funding. In particular, the traffic forecasts are uncoupled from any analysis of tolling. We can see this in the omnibus Q & Aposted in the Work Session materials.

...From those bullet points, the model forecasts a 5% or 13% increase in vehicles on the current bridges in 2040. But under all the scenarios of tolls more than $1.00, future traffic on the bridges is reduced below current levels, not increased. And even at the $1.00 level it obtains a clear reduction for 15 years. In any tolling scenario these vehicle counts are wildly off.

...Tolling and decongestion pricing are some of the most powerful tools we have, maybe even the most powerful tool period, to reduce congestion and better manage bridge capacity. Since tolls are unpopular, the SRC has instead minimized them and focused on making the case for building a new bridge.

Q & A on Induced Demand Biased, Depends on Out of Date Scholarship.
At the center of the materials published for the Wednesday Work Session on the SRC is an omnibus Q & A, a staff report arranged as a series of questions and answers. It is almost medieval in form, a modern quaestio or Sentences! It aspires to be a Summa.

You know that's an ironic setup. The report is supposed to be magisterial and neutral, but it is biased and unrepresentative. Too often it is ideologically motivated. Rather than the best of medieval scholasticism, it is the worst of it, narrow, cramped, and oriented with a determined teleology.

Here we will look at Induced Demand.

The Sources are too Few and are Biased

In the discussion of induced demand and traffic forecasting the material is shaped in order to position autoism as a "neutral" description of reality, the natural order of things, rather than a highly ideological and heavily subsidized position resulting from multiple policy decisions over years and even decades.

...As a concept and term, it is significant they prefer "latent" demand to "induced" demand. Latent demand is pent-up, already existing demand that is frustrated and which a new bridge might solve and satisfy. "Induced" demand is new demand brought into being by a new bridge. The difference expresses an ideological preference for the bridge as a solution to a problem. It is another instance of bias and failure to be even-handed.

...All in all, the perspective in the Q & A is one from the 20th century, struggling to keep up. It is old, it is being discarded or modified, and it does not represent current best practices or the state of scholarship. It looks, in fact, like adding epicycles to the old Ptolemaic system with earth at the center when a heliocentric system explains things much better.

SRC Cost Estimate and 40% Contingency Nearly Certain to be Inadequate.
But it does not seem like a stretch to say that the SRC is still in a high [earthquake] risk area, and that reinforcing the current bridges still is a better bet - not a certainty, but is a better probability - than building a new bridge at the current Preferred Alternative's location.

If you were placing a sports bet - think about that big football game next week - which would you choose?

Would you bet on the Preferred Alternative? Or would you bet on reinforcing the existing bridges? Betting on the SRC here seems like it is easily the longer-shot and that the odds on the current crossing locations are better.

The "Findings" in the Geological Resources Technical Report Addendum from Sept 2016 should not inspire confidence. It is a tissue of weasel words and hardly constitutes an actual finding. Clearly they are concerned and warning about difficulties discovered during construction, and have written a very evasive and "CYA" conclusion.

Even in the final bullet, which presumes "proper geotechnical investigations...proper engineering design" and "mitigation measures," they still can't bring themselves to use a positive verb of certainty or confidence, and hide behind "could." There's a lot of risk and uncertainty hiding in plain sight.

...There is no reason to think a 40% contingency would be adequate here. There is every reason to think 40% is way too small. Again, do you bet 40% is enough, or do [you] bet a much larger contingency would be necessary?

SRC Q&A Misleads on Greenhouse Gas Emissions.
We have to drive less often and drive fewer miles. Any plan that fails to face this squarely will be a sham. SRC claims that we can drive more, drive faster, and still meet greenhouse gas goals, is bogus. Adopted plans must support VMT [Vehicle Miles Traveled] reductions.

...If we need to reduce greenhouse gases drastically, an incremental reduction in tailpipe emissions will not be enough. We need to drive less, not drive more and drive faster. 

Path dependency is an issue. If we build a giant new bridge and highway, it will be more difficult to reduce driving holistically after the bridge is constructed. If drive-alone trips are less costly in general, transit will seem more unattractive, for example. The more auto capacity we build, the more future reductions we will need to make, and the harder they will be.

If on the other hand, we don't build the bridge, it will be easier to focus more on transit and other non-auto mobility.

If we think less driving will be necessary, we should not be building things for more driving.

Traffic Modeling and False Precision in the SRC Q and A.
The big Q & A on the SRC has several sections that use traffic modeling, but no section on the modeling itself. The document assumes the truthfulness and usefulness of a set of traffic forecasts for 2040.

I want to step back a little and ask some questions about the way we handle the traffic forecasts. Above all, the SRC team, and traffic planners here generally, both in public employment and in private contracting, pretty much everyone involved in traffic engineering, elide the uncertainty around forecasts. If there is any statistical uncertainty around the projections, you'd never know it.

There are also a couple of other ways that planners play fast-and-loose with the forecasting.

Traffic Forecasts Generally Deserve Margins of Error

As we receive the forecasts now - and they are delivered rather ex cathedra - they are full of false precision.

...By eliding uncertainty ranges, it becomes possible to make silly claims for the SRC.

(And even if you accept the numbers straight-up, come on, a 10% improvement for $500 million?!?!?! And more likely a billion with cost overruns and escalations? 10% or even 15% is an amazingly tiny return on a huge, huge investment.)

"Daunting" Q and A Casts Unfavorable Light on Planning Goal 1 and DEIS.
The Q & A for the SRC Council Work Session is a funny thing. It's supposed to be neutral and even-handed, but it is not.

In the introduction they admit "some of the references may not be the seminal work or the latest on the topic."

Why doesn't this Q & A represent the best state of the research on a given topic? This is a strange thing to admit from the start - unless that's an indirect admission that the document is already biased.

From here, based on the section on Induced Demand, it has looked like apologetics for the bridge, and not a neutral analysis. So omitting "seminal work" could be consistent with a pro-bridge bias.

But more than this, they say "providing in a single document all the information necessary...is a daunting undertaking."

But isn't "providing all the information" what the draft Environmental Impact Statement was supposed to do?

It is possible to read this also as an admission that the DEIS [Draft Environmental Impact Statement] wasn't written to do what it was supposed to do, but was a biased document with a rigged process.

These admissions or concessions in the introduction sound humble and inviting, but they might instead be signs of deeper rot, an indictment of the whole preceding SRC process.

 

Five reasons Statesman Journal has hit a new low

It doesn't give me pleasure to write about the further decline of Salem, Oregon's one and only daily newspaper, the Statesman Journal.

I'll end this post with a poignant anecdote from a New Yorker story about the death of newspapers. It isn't pleasant to watch the demise of someone that you care about. But turning our head away from reality isn't good either.

So building on previous blog posts I've written about how this Gannett newspaper has been steadily tumbling down the slope of journalistic excellence (recent posts assembled here), here's Five Reasons Statesman Journal Has Hit a New Low.

Introductory note: as mentioned above, the most recent issue of the New Yorker has a great piece, "Does Journalism Have a Future?" It talks about how BuzzFeed, among other online news sources, pioneered the use of lists -- which metrics show site visitors love. So I figured, what the heck, might as well jump on the list train.
Download Does Journalism Have a Future? | The New Yorker

(1) Additional firings are disturbing. Gannett recently ordered large layoffs, a.k.a. firings, of staff at its newspapers. I've heard that three newsroom employees at the Statesman Journal were fired: Carol McAlice Currie (opinions), Gary Horowitz (sports), and Amy Read (online/social media). 

Currie and Horowitz no longer appear on the newspaper's staff roster, so it appears to be correct that they've been let go. I assume the same is true of Read.

This significantly diminishes the Statesman Journal's ability to practice quality journalism, coming as it does on the heels of previous layoffs. Every business needs to cut fat. But the Statesman Journal has been cutting bone and muscle for a long time.

(2) The three people will be missed. Above is a screenshot of a profile of Currie. At the time the profile was posted, she'd worked at the Statesman Journal for 21 years. The next screenshot shows that Horowitz also worked at the Statesman Journal for 21 years. Read's profile says she began working at the Statesman Journal in 2002, 17 years ago,

So these aren't "cub reporters" who were fired.

They are some of the most competent people at the Statesman Journal, having a combined 59 years of journalism experience with the newspaper.

About ten days ago my wife and I spent a pleasant couple of hours at the French Press coffeehouse talking with Currie about a possible opinion page project. We found her wonderfully open, informed, and pleasant. Firing her is a big loss for both the Statesman Journal and subscribers.

Another gripe: to my knowledge so far the Statesman Journal hasn't reported on the firings or honored the lengthy service of Currie, Horowitz, and Read with a "we're sorry we had to let them go" story. The story could explain why this supposedly was necessary. Or, if it wasn't necessary, why the Statesman Journal is forced to follow Gannett orders.

(3) Pettiness about blogger moi. Back in December I submitted a guest opinion to the Statesman Journal about the Broadway Commons boycott caused by the Salem Alliance Church's mistaken view that homosexuality and same-sex sex is a sin. 

When January came, I told Carol McAlice Currie, the opinion page editor before she was fired, that I was going to share the opinion piece on one of my blogs, since it didn't appear the Statesman Journal was going to publish it. Currie emailed me:

My executive editor scuttled your guest opinion for a variety [of] reasons, mostly because you have a blog/existing outreach for your ideas.

Cherril Crosby is the executive editor of the Statesman Journal. On behalf of bloggers everywhere, it irks me that Crosby is discriminating against us.

Hey, Ms. Crosby, I've been blogging regularly since 2003. Not only have I earned zero money from the approximately 5,850 blog posts I've written, now on three blogs, every year I pay Typepad to continue to use my blogging platform.

Fairly often Statesman Journal reporters learn of a potential story by reading my Salem-related posts. Often journalists and opinion writers have blogs. Bloggers are supportive of newspapers. Newspapers should be equally supportive of bloggers. 

After all, as newspapers steadily disappear, other sources of local news are going to become more important. Yes, I regularly criticize Gannett and the Statesman Journal. But that's because I care about newspapers. If I didn't care, I wouldn't criticize.

(4) USA Today section goes away. As part of what I interpret as the Statesman Journal moving closer to being online only, recently the USA Today section in the newspaper was deleted except for a single page of national news. Along with other subscribers, I got a self-serving email from the Statesman Journal (probably written by Gannett) which said in part:

Brian,
We know that the world is more connected than ever. News and information doesn't have boundaries thanks to the power of the internet and the growth of social media. 

We hear consistently from readers that they crave a robust local news report, but also want more exposure to stories happening at the national or international level.

...We will continue to provide a daily package of national and international news in the daily print edition, although the current free-standing compact USA TODAY section will no longer exist.

Well, if the Statesman Journal actually was giving subscribers "a robust local news report," losing the USA Today section wouldn't have bothered me and my wife as much. But when the paper does a crappy job covering local news, then ditches a section of national and international news, we consider that a loss.

And, no, we won't be accessing USA Today via the online offer provided by the Statesman Journal. I subscribe to both the New York Times and Washington Post online editions, and my wife prefers CNN to USA Today. 

(5) Timeliness is missing. There are some good reasons why the Statesman Journal should go fully online, even though many subscribers hooked on the print edition likely will hate this. One reason is that anyone with a smartphone or computer can learn about "breaking news" (I hate how CNN and others overuse that term) soon after it happens.

Case in point: sitting in our bathtub, last Thursday night I learned via the Oregonian's iPhone app that the Oregon men's basketball team had suffered a painful loss to Washington. On Friday the Oregonian ran the story on the front page of Sports in the print edition. 

Apparently because the Statesman Journal is printed in Eugene, our local newspaper didn't have a story about the Oregon loss until today, Saturday. When I saw the dramatic headline in today's Sports section (see above), at first I thought oh, no, the Ducks have lost again. 

But then I realized that the paper was reporting on Saturday what happened on Thursday night. Now perhaps there was an earlier online story about the Ducks' loss. I just find the online Oregonian easier to use, with better sports reporting, so that's where I go for breaking sports news.

UPDATE: Just came across a devastating critique of Gannett, "Local newspapers have already been gutted. There's nothing left to cut." This excerpt sounds exactly like what's happening here in Salem.

Gannett is ripe for a hedge fund raid, because cost containment has been the company’s only successful strategy for years. On the print side, Gannett is actively alienating its core readership — still its most valuable source of revenue — by reducing pages, cutting features and moving up deadlines so that virtually nothing that happens after 6 p.m. makes the next day’s paper. That includes sports scores, city council meetings and major news: When Nashville holds local elections this year, those results won’t make it into print for two days. 

Lastly, here's how the New Yorker story I mentioned above ends.

Like I said, there's no joy in seeing a once-beloved newspaper become a shadow of its former self. However, much of that diminishment is self-imposed by Gannett and Statesman Journal executives. It gets harder to love a newspaper that chooses to surrender journalistic quality in the face of pressures.

Jill Lepore wrote:

The death of a newspaper is sometimes like other deaths.

The Mrs. and the Miss, a very, very old woman and her very old daughter, lived in a crooked green house on top of a rise and wore matching housecoats and slippers. The Miss followed the Mrs. around like a puppy, and, if you found them in the parlor reading the paper, the Mrs. would be poring over the opinion pages while the Miss cut pictures out of the funnies.

“The Miss can’t think straight,” my father said. “Her head’s scrambled. So be gentle with her. Nothing to be afraid of. Be sure to help them out.” Once when I biked over there, the Miss was standing, keening, noise without words, sound without sense. The Mrs. wasn’t moving, and she wasn’t ever going to move again.

I called for help and held the Miss’s hand, waiting for the wail of sirens. I didn’t know what else to do. 

Heritage School needs to be treated fairly by the City of Salem

I like David and Goliath stories. I always root for David, the little guy or gal.

That's why I'm hoping Salem's small 35-student Heritage School gets treated fairly by City officials and the City Council regarding its concerns about what the large, rich, and powerful Mountain West Investment Corporation wants to build adjacent to the school.

A Statesman Journal story mostly misses the point about why the Heritage School wants to see changes made to a Mountain West proposal to build a 180-unit apartment complex next to the school. 

The story, "Salem's Fairview Training Center was intended as a green business, residential community. What happened?," veers off into describing the complex history of Fairview after the 275 acre site in south Salem was bought in 2002 by a group of people with a dream of fashioning the property into a world-class sustainable community. 

[UPDATE: I shared a PDF file of the story, but the Statesman Journal just told me that even though I've subscribed to the newspaper for 42 years, it's a no-no to share the copyrighted story, so I removed the file.]

But the real story is about what's happening today, not yesterday.

Looking back is fine as a historical exercise.

However, the conflict between what Mountain West wants to construct and what the Heritage School considers to be in accord with Master Plans for developments on the Fairview property almost certainly is going to come before the Salem City Council eventually, so the Mayor, councilors, and City officials need to have a firm grasp on a few simple truths that weren't emphasized enough in the Statesman Journal story.

Here's the truths:

(1) Further development at Fairview is supposed to be guided by the 2005 Fairview Master Plan and 2016 Amended Fairview Refinement Plan. There are other refinement plans, such as the Pringle Creek Community and Fairview Addition refinement plans, both of which emphasize principles of sustainability that are supposed to be reflected in every Fairview development project. 

(2) The Heritage School bought property at Fairview in 2004, expecting that further development in the acreage surrounding the school would be developed in accord with the Fairview Master Plan. Sure, "refinements" to that plan were expected, but not massive changes. 

(3) Indeed, the 2016 refinement plan says, "Special care is taken as the land added to the Refinement Plan area is regulated to be compatible with the adjoining land uses." So since the Heritage School has been at Fairview for 15 years, people involved with the school rightfully expect that the Mountain West apartment complex will reflect the above-mentioned principles of sustainability, as Pringle Creek Community and Fairview Addition do to a large extent.

(4) But Mountain West basically has plans to construct three-story buildings that are similar, if not identical, to other apartment complexes it has built. Only lip service is being paid to green construction, preserving natural surroundings, encouraging alternative transportation, and other sustainable principles that are supposed to be followed by those developing property at what's known as "Sustainable Fairview."

Obviously Mountain West Investment Corporation knew it was buying land that's supposed to be developed in accord with the Fairview Master Plan and Refinement Plan. Yet the company is asking for a bunch of variances that would allow it to escape various requirements of those plans.

See my first blog post on this subject, "Salem's Heritage School seeks changes to Mountain West apartment complex plan."

It's important to note that what the Heritage School is requesting is that Mountain West be required to build the apartment complex in accord with the sustainable vision that makes the Fairview property unique in Salem.

Seemingly Mountain West is counting on City staff, the Planning Commission, and the City Council on being willing to give a big rich, powerful "Goliath" developer an exemption from the sustainable principles that drew the Heritage School, Pringle Creek Community, and Fairview Addition/Olsen Development to Fairview.

Which isn't fair.  

Since Mountain West wants to build a standard cookie-cutter apartment complex, it should have bought land elsewhere in Salem, not at Fairview. Plunking a non-sustainable development in the middle of the Sustainable Fairview property diminishes the stake of those who chose to locate at Fairview before Mountain West. 

The Statesman Journal story describes the minimal commitment Mountain West is making to Fairview's sustainable vision.

Brian Moore, Mountain West's director of real estate development, outlined features of the development "that we believe advance sustainable purposes." Those include the installation of electric-vehicle charging stations and the preservation of 21 mature trees, with plans to plant more than 250 additional trees.

Whoopee. This is pathetic.

I'm pretty sure Mountain West is required to preserve the mature trees in accord with a tree conservation plan in the 2016 Refinement Plan. And a few charging stations is almost insulting to the original vision of Sustainable Fairview.

My wife and I owned shares in Sustainable Fairview Associates from 2003 to 2006, when we checked out with a 30% profit after I became a SFA gadfly -- being dissatisfied with how development of the property was being carried out (or rather, attempted to be carried out). 

So it's pained me to observe how the original vision for Sustainable Fairview has been steadily chipped away, with the notable exception of Pringle Creek Community. Some of the blame for this falls on City officials who care more about having some sort of development occur at Fairview rather than requiring quality sustainable development.

And here we go again, revisiting what happened in 2012 when I pleaded in a blog post, "City Council, preserve the vision of 'Sustainable Fairview.'" Back then, as now, a standard apartment complex was planned for what should be a special community. Hopefully the City Council will act more wisely this time. Here's some excerpts from the post:

Please, Salem (Oregon) City Council. Pretty please.

Don't allow the beautiful property in south Salem to become less than the world-class Green development that Sustainable Fairview currently is zoned as.

A few days ago I learned that the Salem Planning Commission is OK with turning the undeveloped portion of the property from a vibrant green to a blah gray, architecturally speaking. On May 14 the City Council meets to decide whether to allow Simpson Hills, LLC to build a bunch of typical apartments on 43 of the 104 acres it owns at the site that used to house the Fairview Training Center.

...When Simpson Hills, LLC bought 104 acres of the Sustainable Fairview property, the buyers knew that this was, duh..., a sustainable development with especially sustainable zoning regulations that had been approved by the City of Salem quite a few years ago.

The vision of the Sustainable Fairview Master Plan, for example, included having highly energy-efficient homes; all stormwater captured on site; minimal emphasis on cars/roads; varied types of housing; mixed uses on site so people could "live, work, and play" in a conveniently compact area.

Disappointingly, Simpson Hills, LLC now wants to back off substantially from those laudable goals.

Note the expanse of gray in the plan for lots 1-3 above. Those are parking lots and roads. Lots of lots. Lots of roads. The rain water that runs off them, which will be lots, is planned to end up in the holding pond shown on the right of the drawing. Then all the water will go into Pringle Creek. 

Pringle Creek Community, by contrast, has permeable asphalt and other ways of capturing stormwater. And the original plans for Sustainable Fairview envisioned limited "obvious" parking, with cars sequestered behind dwelling units, rather than prominently parked front and center.

...Simpson Hills, LLC shouldn't be allowed to breeze into town with a cookie-cutter proposal for the Sustainable Fairview property that maximizes profits for themselves and minimizes Salem's chance to have a world class Green development. 

...Frequently I critique Salem's blah'ness on this blog. There's a good reason Oregon's capital is nicknamed "So-lame." Often, it is.

Sustainable Fairview is a non-lame flash of creativity, innovation, excitement, and world-class Green design that needs to be nurtured, not crushed by a Simpson Hills, LLC proposal which seeks to markedly diminish those qualities.

Well, ditto with the current Mountain West proposal.

City may buy Hillcrest after Mark Wigg proposed this. West Salem Loop is another Wigg idea.

This is a great example of bottom-up creativity here in Salem.

As far as I know, the City of Salem had no intention of buying the 45-acre property that formerly housed the Hillcrest Youth Correctional Facility until Salem activist Mark Wigg proposed this, and I shared Wigg's ideas in a September 2018 blog post that went to City officials: "Hillcrest is for sale. The City of Salem should buy it."

Here's how my post started out.

The State of Oregon has put the 45 acre Hillcrest property up for sale. According to Wikipedia, Hillcrest was a youth correctional facility that closed on September 1, 2017. 

I learned of this from Mark Wigg, who is active in promoting more walking/cycling trails in Salem, along with more parks. Below you can read a presentation Wigg emailed me, which I presume has been sent to City of Salem officials and City Council members.

What he says makes a lot of sense. In a follow-up email, Wigg added: "Living accommodations for 300. Gym kitchens classrooms pool."

It's good to see that City officials are seriously considering Wigg's idea, as reported yesterday in a Statesman Journal story, "City of Salem considers purchasing former Hillcrest Youth Correctional Facility property."

Salem officials are weighing whether to buy the former Hillcrest Youth Correctional Facility on the city's southeast side, though it's too soon to say what they'd do with the land.

...The Oregon Department of Administrative Services, which generally handles the state's real estate transactions, has listed the roughly 45-acre Hillcrest site at 2450 Strong Road SE — across the street from the former Fairview Training Center property — for $5.6 million. 

...Hillcrest has several halls, an administrative building and a former high school. Should Salem officials buy the Hillcrest site, they would consider leaving at least one of the buildings for housing, according to a city report.

The site's administrative building is apparently "the most feasible option" to turn into transitional single room occupant housing that would include restroom and kitchen facilities, according to the report.

Since Mark Wigg had a great idea about the City of Salem buying Hillcrest, the folks at City Hall should pay attention to other Wigg proposals. In 2016 I wrote about his idea for a Salemtowne to Downtown multi-use path in "Why people will LOVE to use a multi-use path in West Salem." 

And here's Wigg's newest great idea for a multi-use path he calls the West Salem Loop. It incorporates the Salemtowne to Downtown path along a Marine Drive easement. See this PDF file for the long description of the proposal.
Download Trail dream-West Salem Loop

This is a short description. The petition can be viewed and printed out via this PDF file.
Download West Salem Loop petition

Here's clickable email links for Councilor Jim Lewis and Councilor Cara Kaser. Please let them know that you want the City of Salem to make the West Salem Loop a priority. This would be a wonderful addition to Salem's multi-use paths.

Progressives rule City Council, but City of Salem has "deep state" problem

I'm not a fan of the whole deep state thing when Trump supporters use the term to denigrate career federal employees who are simply trying to do their job as best they can. 

But rightly or wrongly, deep state has become a sort of shorthand for government officials hanging on to past policy positions after the political winds of change have begun blowing in a different direction. So that's how I'm using the term.

After quite a few years of progressives being outnumbered by conservatives on the Salem City Council, they now enjoy a 6-3 majority. Tom Andersen, Cara Kaser, Sally Cook, Chris Hoy, Matt Ausec, and Jackie Leung constitute the progressive wing. Jim Lewis, Brad Nanke, and Mayor Chuck Bennett make up the conservative wing.

(Yeah, arguably Bennett is a moderate because he tends to swing left or right depending on shifting political breezes. But I still classify him as a conservative.)

Given the progressive tenor of the City Council, liberals in Salem tend to expect that actions by City of Salem staff should reflect the wishes of the voters that have changed the makeup of the council dramatically leftward in the past few elections. 

However, Salem has a strong City Manager and weak City Council form of local government. By and large, City Manager Steve Powers doesn't have to change direction just because the City Council has. A new strategic planning process should change this to some extent, as the City budget should better reflect Council priorities.

But right now we're in an awkward stage where the ponderous City of Salem ship is taking longer to alter course than progressives like me would like. Here's some examples. 

Third Bridge. Even though a clear majority of City Council members oppose the billion dollar (with financing costs) Salem River Crossing project, a.k.a. the Third Bridge, City staff have continued to press onward with it. At least, I'm not aware that City Manager Powers has directed his employees to stop spending time and money on the Salem River Crossing -- perhaps because Mayor Bennett remains a staunch supporter of it. 

Homelessness. Recently Powers ordered a homeless camp under the Marion Street bridge to be removed, and to prevent volunteers from serving meals to the homeless at that location. While there are defensible reasons for these actions, they didn't exactly make City officials look like caring, compassionate people. I'll let an Angry Owl tweet do the talking about this.

Costco. City of Salem planning staff busily worked away on approving a controversial proposal to relocate Salem's Costco to a site along Kuebler Boulevard immediately adjacent to a residential neighborhood. The proposal was a marked departure from an earlier agreement to build a neighborhood retail shopping center there, rather than a giant regional wholesale Costco big box store.

City staff also thought it was fine to allow Costco to remove mature white oaks that are protected by a City ordinance. But the City Council rejected the Costco plan on a 5-3 vote, with five progressives outnumbering the three conservatives.

Mountain West apartment complex. This issue hasn't reached the City Council yet, but it seems a lot like the Costco situation: City of Salem staff approving a development that threatens the Heritage School and ignores the Fairview Master Plan, and refinements to it, that require construction on the Fairview property to be both environmentally sustainable and in harmony with existing developments. So once again City staff may be operating at odds with Council priorities, and prior planning decisions.

Appointment of Jim Lewis to transportation committee. Councilor Lewis not only is a strong supporter of the billion dollar Salem River Crossing boondoggle, he has zero discernible commitment to bike paths and mass transit/public transportation.

Yet Mayor Bennett has appointed one of the three conservatives on the nine-member City Council to an important committee dealing with transportation funding. Here's how the Salem Breakfast on Bikes blogger described this:

The Mayor will announce assignments to various internal and external committees. But on those Council assignments it is interesting to see that Councilor Lewis will again be assigned to our Metropolitan Planning Organization, SKATS.

Councilor Lewis has been, depending on how charitable you feel, either a personality refreshingly independent of Council policy or outright insubordinate.

On the SRC he has consistently acted contrary to Council direction. There are other areas in which it is possible to say he has not very passionately advocated for Council policy and intent, especially when it concerns greenhouse gases or non-auto travel.

It is not difficult to see the Mayor's calculations, his bias for the SRC and preference at SKATS.

But is this something the rest of Council should embrace? The politics are not easy to discern, and it's very possible there are other battles to fight and that this is simply not worth it.

But at the same time, it is strange to have someone at the MPO, which administers significant pots of federal transportation funding, who does not skillfully and passionately advocate for the interests of the City as Council articulates them. Why the tolerance for an underminer?

Division Street trees. People in Salem love their trees. When City of Salem Public Works director Peter Fernandez made a backroom deal with the U.S. Bank president to cut down five beautiful healthy trees on downtown's State Street in 2013, there was a lot of justified outrage. So now it's 2019. Fernandez remains in his job.

And the City of Salem is still aiming to cut down large beautiful healthy downtown trees for no good reason -- in the case of the Division Street trees, to gain a few parking spaces by changing parallel parking to angled parking, even though the public was told that the new police facility would have public parking, but staff chose to eliminate that parking and cut down the trees instead.

Library book removal. It is decidedly weird that the Salem Public Library director, Sarah Strahl, apparently with the support of City Manager Powers, would choose to embark on a massive book removal project shortly after Salem voters approved a $19 million bond measure to make improvements to the library.

Dumping many thousands of books for no good reason doesn't seem like a wise way to say "thank you" to the many people in Salem who love their library and voted for the bond measure. Fortunately, citizen resistance has put a hold on the book removal effort until February 13, when the issue will be revisited by the Library Advisory Board. 

There's a recent letter to the editor about this from Clifford Smith:

Last week, I attended the Salem Public Library Advisory Board meeting and was pleased to see about 80 residents in attendance who, like me, are concerned about what is happening at the library.

The current practice of mass book removal is baffling — the wrong direction for the library and just another step in its degradation.

We are not out of shelving nor floor space. Removal of the Information and Reference Information service desk is both shocking and indefensible.

Elimination of children’s story times, special adult and children’s programs and a Branch Librarian at the West Salem Branch is a total betrayal of that community

I have been a librarian for more than 50 years and have worked in high school, community college, large public university, and several public libraries, 30 of those years at Salem Public Library.

The Salem Public Library was for many years considered by many to be one of the best, if not the best, public libraries in Oregon. Sadly, that is no longer the case.

I sincerely hope the city administration will take a long and hard look at the direction our library is going and take steps to reverse course.

Lastly, City Manager Steve Powers still seems to command the confidence of City councilors. At least, I haven't heard any rumors that his job is in jeopardy. But at some point Powers needs to show that he's acting in accord with what the people of Salem want.

Too often City staff seem to cater to special interests rather than the broad public interest. Powers has been here long enough to now own that problem. How he deals with it could determine how long he's going to remain as City Manager.

Possible Gannett takeover worrisome news for Statesman Journal

Today the Wall Street Journal reported that the Gannett Corporation, which owns the Statesman Journal, is ripe for a takeover.

Since the company that would make a bid for Gannett is notorious for cutting costs at newspapers it owns, I'm sure employees of the Statesman Journal aren't thrilled with this news.

Here's some excerpts from "Hedge-Fund-Backed Media Group Prepares Bid for Gannett." (If you can't access the story via that link, download this PDF file.)
Download Hedge-Fund-Backed Media Group Prepares Bid for Gannett - WSJ

MNG Enterprises Inc., one of the largest newspaper chains in the country, has quietly built a 7.5% position in Gannett’s stock and plans to publicly urge the McLean, Va., publisher to put itself up for sale, the people said.

MNG, better known as Digital First Media, will also offer to buy Gannett for $12 a share, they said, which would represent a 23% premium over Friday’s closing price of $9.75. The shares, which fell steeply last year, have been rising lately.

Closely held Digital First is known for its contentious history with the newspaper industry in part because of its penchant for slashing costs. It has over the past few years made multiple approaches to Gannett about a deal but has been rebuffed, the people said. At least one approach was made in the past month or so. It isn’t clear whether Gannett will be receptive now.

...Digital First Media’s largest shareholder is Alden Global Capital LLC, a New York hedge fund that focuses on investing in distressed companies. It became an investor in the debt of an MNG entity in 2010 after that company’s own bankruptcy and became the biggest shareholder several years ago.

Alden, founded by Randall Smith and Heath Freeman, has more than $1 billion under management. The sometimes-activist investor is known for slashing costs at its media investments through layoffs and the use of zero- based budgeting, an approach that requires operators to justify their expenses each year.

Now it may be that nothing comes of this takeover attempt. And I make no claim to knowing how hedge funds, nor the entities they invest in, operate. 

That said, here's some thoughts about this possible takeover based on some of my previous blog posts about Gannett and the Statesman Journal.

It's been curious to me that in a time of decreasing newspaper popularity and declining advertising revenues, Gannett has chosen to increase the monthly Monday-Sunday home delivery subscription rate from $46 to $68 over the past 18 months or so. 

That's a 48% increase in roughly a year and a half during a time when overall inflation has been running about 2% a year, so around 3% every 18 months. Thus Gannett has been asking Statesman Journal subscribers to pay 16 times more than the general inflation rate to continue getting the newspaper delivered every day.

In May 2018 I wrote a blog post called "The Statesman Journal seems to be on the track of 'How a newspaper dies.'" It starts out this way:

As previously reported, I've heard from a seemingly reliable source that the Statesman Journal, Salem's daily newspaper that's owned by Gannett, will cease being a print publication in 2019.

This would mark another milestone in the paper's steady journalistic decline, both in quantity (number of reporters and original stories) and quality (investigative reporting is minimal, especially on the local level).

Today I read a Politico Magazine piece, "This is How a Newspaper Dies," that provided some fresh insights into what is happening with the Statesman Journal. The subtitle of Jack Shafer's highly interesting story is It's with a spasm of profits.

Now, I don't know how profitable the Statesman Journal is. But what's been happening with the paper is very much in line with Shafer's analysis of the Denver Post and other newspapers owned by a so-called "vulture capitalist," Randall Smith. 

As noted in the excerpt in today's Wall Street Journal story, Smith is a founder of the hedge fund that is involved in the potential Gannett takeover attempt.

I shared the core notion from the Politico piece in this excerpt:

The business-school label for tactics like Alden’s, in which you get fewer customers to pay more for less, as Philip Meyer wrote in his book The Vanishing Newspaper, is “harvesting market position.” By raising prices and lowering quality, a stagnant business can rely on its most loyal customers to continue to buy the product, allowing it to squeeze and squeeze and squeeze its customers as they croak.

That sounds bad. But I argued in the May 2018 post that it's what Gannett already has been doing with the Statesman Journal, and I assume other newspapers owned by Gannett. 

So let's see how many of these criteria for "harvesting market position" by getting fewer customers to pay more for less the Statesman Journal checks off.

Raising subscription prices. Check. The Statesman Journal's Sunday-Monday home delivery rate has increased about 50% in a bit over a year. Annoyingly, new subscribers pay about 1/5 of what loyal long-time subscribers are being charged.

Lowering quality. Check. See "Devastating critique of Salem Statesman Journal by experienced journalist" and "Maybe its time for the Statesman Journal to die."

Declining circulation. Check. See "Salem Statesman Journal daily circulation in steep decline." There was a 41% drop in circulation from 2008 to 2014.

Staff layoffs. Check. See "Layoffs at Statesman Journal tied to worrisome Gannett 'newsroom of the future'."

There's probably no way to reverse the impending demise of newspapers such as the Statesman Journal. Young people aren't interested in paying to read yesterday's news, especially when it is printed on paper. And old people like me who are hooked on a daily newspaper are, sad but true, dying off.

Shafer tells it like it is.

Allow yourself to sympathize with Smith for a moment. He’s deeply invested in a stagnant industry whose primary audience is approaching its own expiration date. Think of the Denver Post and most other newspapers as your grandfather who is on dialysis, has a pacemaker and totes an oxygen tank behind him. He looks alive, but he’s overdue. Your grandfather is a pretty good stand-in for the average newspaper subscriber, too. Habituated to his morning newspaper, he’ll resist cancelling his subscription no matter how raggedy the paper gets or how high the owners jack up the price.

So if harvesting market position has been the previous Gannett business model, seemingly this would make Gannett open to being bought out by investors who have a history of doing the same thing,

Time will tell if this actually happens. If it does, likely this will bring the Statesman Journal closer to journalistic demise.

 

Citizen activism wins latest skirmish in Salem Library Battle of the Books

Jim Scheppke, book lover and former Librarian for the State of Oregon, has done a great job at stimulating citizens to speak out about the Salem Public Library's misguided effort to purge tens of thousands of books from its core collection. 

Here's Scheppke's report about last night's Library Advisory Board meeting at the library's Anderson Room that he posted on the Save Our Books Facebook page. 

BOOKS WIN A REPRIEVE — FOR NOW
Thanks to a standing room only turnout of book lovers and supporters, the Library Advisory Board decided last night to continue the suspension of "the big weed" (as the library staff calls it) until their next meeting on February 13th.

About 90 people packed the Anderson Room and about 30 of them spoke strongly in opposition to the mass book removal project that was ordered by library management in September, but was suspended after concerns were expressed by Salem City Councilors in December.

Most of the attendees speaking in favor of "the big weed" were librarians from other cities defending their professional prerogatives. Many long time Salem citizens including a former City Councilor spoke passionately about what was happening at our library. Some brought books that they had purchased for pennies on the dollar at the Friends bookstore that they believed belong in our library.

So our advocacy won a reprieve, but the controversy continues.

Remarks from library management indicate they have no plans to back off their plan to remove thousands of books from our library. If you want to help us, please mark your calendar for Wednesday, February 13th, when the Library Advisory Board is expected to render a final recommendation on "the big weed."

The Salem Reporter has a story about the Library Advisory Board meeting, "Salem library to pause review another month following lengthy public hearing."

I'm not sure whether Library director Sarah Strahl is a habitually optimistic person, or if she's skilled at putting a positive spin on a negative situation, but this quote from her in the Salem Reporter story is decidedly amusing -- given the amount of opposition to Strahl's book removal policy expressed by citizens last night.

Debate that was sometimes contentious and sometimes poetic lead to the shelving for at least a month of a rigorous review of library books.

...City Librarian Sarah Strahl said she was happy to see so many people asking questions about the library. At least 80 people attended the meeting.

“It’s good to see people so engaged with the library,” she said. “You’re always happy to see that.”

Strahl's comment reminded me of what Trump tweeted about the January 2018 Women's March protests against him and his flawed policies.

Um, no, the women aren't celebrating your supposed accomplishments, narcissist that you are. They're protesting you!

Likewise, most of the people at last night's Library Advisory Board meeting weren't there to merely "engage with the library." Rather, they were protesting Sarah Strahl's book removal efforts.

It would have been nice if Strahl had made more of an effort to understand the concerns of Scheppke and the many others who don't like the notion of the Salem Public Library becoming more like a bookstore and reading room, and less like a place where the collected literary wisdom and creativity of many decades, centuries even, can be found.

I speak as someone who wrote a book about the teachings of Plotinus, a 3rd century Greek Neoplatonist philosopher, called "Return to the One." Not many people are interested in reading about Plotinus. But he was a hugely influential thinker and mystic. Early Christians appropriated his Platonic ideas to flesh out their theology.

So I'm biased toward having books at the Salem Public Library that deserve to be in the core collection for reasons other than how frequently they are checked out.

Hopefully Strahl and her staff will come to see that the arguments of Scheppke and others who testified last night have a lot of merit, and will modify their so-called "big weed" of library books.

In this PDF file you can read seven reasons Scheppke puts forward for why the current book removal policy of the Salem Public Library is seriously flawed.
Download Stop the Book Removal (Rev.)

Here's my previous posts about this subject:

Salem Public Library removing 30% of print book collection. Resistance is mounting.
Library expert criticizes "core book" policy of Salem Public Library
Battle of the Books continues with Salem Public Library on defense

Trump has to be the worst presidential deal-maker ever

For someone who had a book ghostwritten for him called "The Art of the Deal," Donald Trump is a notably shitty dealmaker.

So far in his presidency he's noted for breaking deals -- Paris climate change agreement, Trans-Pacific Partnership, Iran nuclear agreement -- rather than making them. Which figures. Blowing stuff up is a hell of a lot easier than putting stuff together.

The worst thing I can say about Trump is that I consider myself a better dealmaker than he is. And my credentials aren't exactly sterling.

Once I was negotiating with a guy in our carport about a car I was selling. After some talking, it turned out that the guy was the mirror image of me. I was saying, "I feel like the price I'm asking is a bit high," and the other guy was saying, "This car is in such great shape, it's worth more than you're asking."

After we realized the absurdity of what was happening, we laughed and agreed on a price that both of us were happy with.

Which is the essence of a deal, isn't it? Reaching an agreement that makes both sides pleased, even if in reality, one side is getting more out of the deal.

In negotiating with Democratic Congressional leaders about the partial government shutdown and Trump's obsessive desire for border wall funding, it seems clear that Trump has no idea how to handle talks with people who aren't intimidated by him.

This likely is a first for Trump, since he seems to have gotten by in his previous business life by using threats, lawsuits, lies, broken promises, and bravado to get what he wanted. None of those things are going to work with Pelosi and Schumer. They're way more experienced at political dealmaking than Trump is.

What blows my mind the most about his negotiating incompetence is this: he and his Republican surrogates already have made clear how desperate Trump is to get funding for something he can call a "wall." 

News stories have made clear that if Trump can't fulfill this campaign promise (even if Mexico doesn't pay for it), he and his fellow Republicans consider that the chance of him winning reelection in 2020 is low. So unlike a car salesman who tells a customer, "This is my best offer, take it or leave it," Trump has staked out a position of "I'm screwed if I don't get wall funding."

Not surprisingly, Trump's desperation makes Congressional Democrats even more determined not to give him what he so obviously can't live without.

Thus Trump is reduced to making threats about invoking a presidential power to declare a border security emergency, which carries with it a lot of problems of its own. Such as being possibly illegal and decidedly unpopular with everyone but his base, since he'd take money out of the Defense Department budget earmarked for other purposes.

Here's another of Trump's weaknesses that makes him a terrible dealmaker: he lacks empathy. 

Now, taken to extremes this isn't a great attribute for dealmakers. In the car-buying/selling anecdote I shared above, the other guy and I were each overly empathetic. I was visualizing how I'd feel about buying my car, even though I was selling it, and the other guy was visualizing how he'd feel if he was selling the car, even though he was buying it.

But if someone can't put themselves in the other person's shoes, or rather, mind, they're going to have a difficult time getting that person to agree to a deal. 

I'm pretty sure Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are well aware of how badly Trump wants his wall.

However, I'm deeply doubtful that Donald Trump understands how badly Pelosi and Schumer need to hold the line on wall funding -- given the results of the midterm elections where voters overwhelmingly said no way to Trump's border wall fear-mongering.

A compromise on reopening the government seems eminently possible. Yet this requires Trump to do some empathizing that he doesn't seem capable of. Trump needs to take a Democratic "yes" for an answer.

Yes, the Dems are saying, we agree that border security needs to be stronger. They are open to funding a host of border security to-do's, including fencing, so long as nothing looks like what Trump would call a wall. But given how Trump shamelessly lies about everything, he also could lie about an agreement to reopen the government. 

I can picture him saying to his base, "The Democrats want to call it fencing rather than a wall, but we know what they really agreed to: a wall." Likewise, Pelosi and Schumer could say, "Trump wants to call it a wall rather than fencing,  but we know what he really agreed to: fencing."

Both sides have to feel like they won in order to strike a deal between equals. Until Trump realizes this, the standoff between him and the Democrats is going to continue -- with 800,000 government workers stuck in the middle without pay.