Salem Political Snark

City Council should stop library from discarding books needlessly

The Big Weed is up for discussion at next Monday's City Council meeting (July 8, 6 pm). Unfortunately, this agenda item isn't about a garden horror or a massive marijuana plant. 

It concerns the needless removal of books from the Salem Public Library. 

Jim Scheppke, who spent 20 years as the State Librarian for Oregon before he retired, is aghast at how Salem's library has been allowed to deteriorate.

He's amassed a lot of convincing arguments, backed up by solid data, in hopes that even though the library's ill-considered book removal policy is shown as only an information item for the City Council, councilors will act to stop the Big Weed.

Scheppke's report, "Why the Big Weed must end," has been submitted as advance testimony for the City Council meeting. As a lover of books, I found a chart in the report to be deeply disturbing. Here's a screenshot that includes commentary by Scheppke.

Wow. A quarter of the book collection has been lost in the past six years, with every year showing a decline.

Hopefully this long-term decimation of the Salem Public Library's book collection will get more attention from city councilors than a flawed one-month analysis of book removals and additions for May 2019 that's part of a staff report for the upcoming meeting.

This analysis was performed by library staff after it was requested by the City Council in April of this year. So to my mind it's meaningless. Scheppke and other critics of the Big Weed have been hammering library administrators for discarding books without good reason.

So rather than ask library staff to defend prior discarding of books, the City Council gave them advance notice that the next month's book removal effort would be scrutinized. Not surprisingly, for the month of May things looked more or less OK. Here's how Scheppke described this in an email to supporters of ending the Big Weed.

The so-called “tracking study” done in May is being used to try to show that the Council has nothing to worry about if they give the green light. Of course the whole thing was rigged to put the situation in the best light. 

As this chart from the agenda packet shows, in May 592 adult non-fiction books were added and 499 were removed “through review.” Another 77 were weeded for condition (“snags”), for a net gain of 16 books.

 

Trouble is this was a totally atypical month, because we know that in the past six years our adult book collection has not grown. It has been reduced by 24%. In each of the past six years an average of 10% of the collection has been removed, the result being that we now have one of the smallest book collections per capita of any library in the state.

 

Our collection of only 1.6 books per capita is far below the state average of about 2 books per capita.

 

The May tracking study was “lipstick on a pig.” It is an attempt to fool the Salem City Council to look the other way so that thousands more books can be removed from our library, as happened last fall.

I'm bothered not only by this current example of City of Salem staff doing the lipstick on a pig thing, but how this has been a frequent way of operating by city officials during the tenure of City Manager Steve Powers. Meaning, citizen concerns often are not directly addressed. Instead, bureaucratic double-talk is used to defend otherwise indefensible city policies. 

In this case, Scheppke and others have systematically documented how the Salem Public Library has failed to follow generally accepted guidelines for discarding books. Yet neither the City Librarian, Sarah Strahl, nor her acquiescent Library Advisory Board have presented cogent arguments against Scheppke, et.al.

Instead, they just say they should be allowed to keep on with their Big Weed, facts be damned. Which isn't how any government official should behave, especially a librarian who supposedly is dedicated to facts, reason, and open discussion.

There's still time to submit testimony to the City Council urging that the Salem Public Library stop discarding books for no good reason. Email your thoughts to [email protected] and reference Agenda Item 6.b

Here's another excerpt from Scheppke's tell-all report:

The Big Picture

 

In closing I want to step back from the Big Weed and make note of the fact that most Salem elected officials and library users do not realize how substandard our library has become. It's not just the adult book collection that has suffered a "death by 1,000 cuts" over several decades.

 

When I moved to Oregon with my librarian wife in 1986, the Salem Public Library, under the outstanding leadership of George Happ, was regarded as one of the best public libraries in Oregon. The library was known as an innovator.

 

It was the first to have an auditorium (and even today only one other public library, Beaverton City Library, has one). It was the first library to have an interactive space for children, the Discovery Room, which still draws children to the library today. There was a time with our library even offered low cost dial-up Internet service to make the Internet available to more citizens. How far we have fallen from those glory days.

 

The Oregon Public Library Report Card compares the 29 largest libraries in Oregon (those serving over 25,000 population) on 14 different key metrics that assess library quality and library performance. For each metric a grade is awarded based on how the library falls within a quintile ranking of the 29 libraries.

 

As shown in the comparison of the top eight libraries in the state, the Salem Public Library scores no better than a D or an F on 9 of the 14 metrics, worse than any other major library. Its best score is a B for Children's Program  Attendance Per Capita. But all the other scores range from mediocre to poor.

 

What drives most of the poor scores for our library is the metric Total Library Expenditures Per Capita where our library scores an F, with expenditures of only $28.52 per capita. Our library ranks third from the bottom of all 29 libraries serving over 25,000 population. Even the Jackson County Library, which has struggled for funding in the past decade with the dramatic decline in county timber receipts, manages to spend about $10 more per capita than our library.

 

And the top funded library, Multnomah County Library spends over three times the amount per capita as our library. Eugene spends more than twice as much.

 

It should be clear that our library will stay at the bottom of the heap as the worst major library in Oregon unless some way is found to improve library funding. The Big Weed just rubs salt into the wound. To me it's madness to set out to discard thousands of books when our library's ability to replace them and to grow our collection appears to be nonexistent at this time.

Gov. Brown and Salem Reporter shine in climate bill saga

After being deeply upset with how Democrats and Republicans behaved in the walkout of GOP members of the state Senate over HB 2020, a cap and trade climate bill, it's great to find some bright spots in this saga -- Governor Kate Brown and Aubrey Wieber, a Salem Reporter journalist.

Governor Kate Brown has earned back my admiration after she responded to the first May walkout of Republican senators by agreeing to kill two bills that were opposed by the GOP, being Democratic priorities  (a pro-vaccine bill and a gun control bill).

I thought this bad move would encourage Republicans to test Democratic resolve later in the legislative session. But I figured such would happen in the House, not the Senate, since GOP members of the Senate had agreed not to walk out again for the rest of the session.

They lied.

Pleasingly, it appears that Brown didn't give up anything of importance in the second walkout. After ordering the Oregon State Police to find the Republican senators who had deserted their posts, they came back on their own and played nice, mostly, during a rush to vote on over a hundred backed-up bills last weekend. 

Brown inspired the crowd at a pro-climate bill rally last Tuesday in her brief but passionate remarks, even though Senate President Courtney had declared HB 2020 dead earlier in the day given lackluster support among Senate Democrats. 

So there's a good chance the walkout of Senate Republicans had no effect on the passage of HB 2020, given that at least three Senate Democrats were either strong No's or leaning that way prior to the walkout.

Today Governor Brown made a strong statement in favor of pursuing the carbon pollution reduction goals of HB 2020, either through executive action or reintroduction of the climate bill. Here's the first part of a Salem Reporter story by Aubrey Wieber, "Governor threatens to do by rule what she couldn't by legislation."

Less than 24 hours after the 2019 Legislature closed, Gov. Kate Brown renewed the fight for a cap and trade program, saying Monday she might act with her executive authority to drive ahead with the hotly contested environmental policy.

“Let me be very, very clear,” Brown said. “I am not backing down.”

She spoke on the heels of a major political collapse last week, when Senate Republicans doomed a vote on House Bill 2020. The legislation, setting up a market-based credit system to force polluting industries to reform, had passed the House and was one vote away in the Democratically controlled Senate from becoming state law.

Brown wasn’t taking her most significant legislative loss lightly.

Brown said she wants to see action sooner than later, and is open to calling a special session to again advance the legislation.

“I believe the bill needs some fine-tuning, but I don’t think it needs to be entirely rebuilt,” she said.

Brown said she campaigned on cap and trade, as did many Democratic legislators elected in November. Recent polling shows climate legislation is popular among Oregonians, though more so in urban areas. Her plan was backed by most Oregon voters, she said.

Excellent. Very heartening. Makes me hopeful that Oregon will be a leader in fighting global warming.

It's great that Brown and Democratic leaders in the state legislature, with the notable exception of increasingly useless Senate President Courtney, are standing firm against Republican efforts to declare HB 2020 dead and gone forever, which, clearly, it isn't.

I followed news about the walkout of Republican senators, and what happened after they returned, with rapt attention.

Journalists with the Oregonian, Statesman Journal, and Willamette Week all did very good reporting. But I consider that Aubrey Wieber and his colleagues at the online-only Salem Reporter stood out from the journalistic pack.

Political junkie that I am, Wieber's frequent tweets on Twitter were highly appreciated, especially during the drama in the Senate last Saturday and Sunday. On Twitter I also follow reporters from the newspapers I just mentioned.

Wieber blew them away with his cogent, informative, and grammatically correct tweets. (Yeah, I'm old fashioned. I like complete sentences and accurate spelling in tweets.) I had the feeling that I was looking over the shoulder of a skilled reporter as he observed the machinations in the state Senate, telling his Twitter followers what was going on.

I realize that many people consider Twitter to be an annoying echo chamber of little value. However, it also can be the best means of conveying breaking news, which Wieber masterfully did. As far as I could tell, he was on duty at the legislature for very long hours over the weekend. 

Hopefully Wieber will get a vacation soon, because he deserves one. For not only did he excel on Twitter, his "long form" stories in Salem Reporter were marvelously written as well.