Budget, Pool Fees, Econ Dev, Energy, and the Skate Park

Dear People: We have a pretty heavy agenda to get through tonight on Village Council (7 pm, Bryan Center). The main item is our annual appropriations ordinance,, i.e., the budget for this year, 2009.

BUDGET: This is perhaps our most important discussion of the year. Please come! We are set to pass what I believe to be a solid, responsible budget tonight--one that should still slightly increase our reserves and that gives appropriate moneys to long term values of the Village. There are still many letters showing up in the YS News about the budget, some of which I would say have actual misinformation: for example, one letter this week alleges that we have not spent the money from the levy as promised to street improvements. Let me be clear: the levy, crafted by a previous Council and approved by a narrow vote of the citizenry, was not designed to go 100% to street improvements.

If you look at the table on the first page of the YS News this week, you'll see that the previous Council and ours has actually overspent the percentage set aside for streets, and underspent on other promised areas--sometimes for good reasons. (For example: since we haven't been sure what is the best way forward on economic development, it hasn't seemed prudent to simply spend money for the sake of spending it; the pool, also, did not need some of the suggested changes, but may be reaching the end of its useful life. We are planning to look at whether it might make sense to start setting money aside and working towards building a new pool.). However, we'll seek to bring that spending back into alignment as we move through Visioning and the final two years of the current levy.

Our investment in the green space fund, energy efficiency, and the modest budget request from the Human Rights Commission (which is also a separate discussion item--see below) to help with programming will likely be seriously questioned. It's a lot easier to defend those spending priorities if people who care about them show up. I'd love to see your smiling faces out there.

We'll also discuss three other items of legislation:

• A new schedule of pool fees for residents and non-residents, already informally approved at an earlier meeting, including new, lower rates for seniors, and explicitly allowing for grandparents with live-in grandchildren over the summer to pay the resident rate for their family pass.
• Budget transfers to cover the next month while this new budget is still pending.
• A new, updated lease with the library (as recommended by the library commission and our village lawyer)

Special reports will be made:

• Human Relations Commission will offer their annual report and explain why they are requesting a $9,000 budget line to help with programming that they believe will encourage inclusiveness and justice in our village.
  
• Environmental Commission will make its annual report

Old business will include:

• Economic Development task force/ next steps
• Energy task force/next steps
• Visioning/Planning consultant selection: next steps
• The Skate Park--needs some repairs and there are suggestions that it needs some reconfiguring to avoid vandalism problems on nearby property. Please show up if you are concerned about youth recreation in our town!
  

New Business:

• Appointments will be made to the Environmental Commission and the Cable Advisory Panel.

Then there'll be reports and agenda planning before we adjourn for the evening. Hope to see you there!

Peace!
L.

Council Notes and Office Hours this week

1) OFFICE HOURS I have to move my office hours up an hour this week to accommodate meeting with my Wittenberg students Monday afternoon. So, Monday 10-11:30am is when I'll have coffee/brunch at the Emporium.

2) PLANNING COMM. MONDAY @ 7pm: We'll be considering, again, the Friends Care Center's proposal for the Barr property. In the Planning Commission packet there are several impassioned letters speaking against the current plan, largely but not exclusively from neighbors (we received none in favor of it this time). Also included in the package is a drawing indicating what looks to me like a fairly significant redesign. Please let me know your thoughts.

2) VISION / ECON DVPT: I've been reading Howard Zinn and several other historians today (see my new signature quotation below for a flavor!), and wrestling with the notion of a) what ARE the roots of our Council/manager form of government--both the truly progressive elements of its history and also its conservative, socialism-busting elements--and b) with envisioning our village's future. Basically, the conflicts we're experiencing today have long roots, and involve significant differences in political and economic philosophy.

I hope that you all had a chance to read the articles in the past two weeks of the Yellow Springs News about differing notions of economic development: first on the Shuman model adopted by St. Lawrence County NY, Ann Arbor MI, and Carborro NC and others (1/31), and, second, the vision being proposed by the YSA described in this past week's paper (2/7). Please do share your thoughts with Council on this important issue.

3) REGENESIS? The Regenesis group, from Santa Fe NM is another group that Ted Donnell and others have been working to bring to Yellow Springs:

"Ben Haggard of The Regenesis Group is visiting Yellow Springs next weekend. He will be giving a presentation to all interested community members on February 16 on the Regenesis approach to community planning. The specific time and location will be announced as soon as it is determined. Please share this with other community members you think might be interested.You might be interested in visiting their website http://www.regenesisgroup.com/index.php."

4) REVIEW OF VILLAGE MANAGER: The Council will be doing an annual review of the work of manager Eric Swansen, and we invite public input. Many positive letters were in our packet last week.

5) BUDGET: HELP? If any one out there is good at reading complex budgets, I'd really love some help when I finally see ours, with examining it and thinking through how to make it fit our community's values. Let me know if you can assist!

Peace!
Lori

Here's a fuller version of the quotation I'm now using as part of my email signature:

"There can be no doubt that democracy distrusts the expert . . . and there is no doubt also that much of this distrust is well grounded and thoroughly justified. This is due partly to the air of unwarranted superiority which the expert too frequently assumes and partly to the fact that history presents a long record of self-constituted experts who have been discredited. . . . In earlier times there was an expert class in theology that proposed to do the thinking for the human race in matters religious. There have been military castes, self-confessed experts who have succeeded more than once in imposing not only their professional but their class interests upon the civil population. The only kind of expert democracy ought to tolerate is the expert who admits his fallibility, retains an open mind, and is prepared to serve."

--Charles Beard, "Democracy and the Expert" 1916 (Charles Beard is one of the most respected historians of the early 20th century; he helped work out many progressive era public policy changes, including the development of the council-manager format. He went on to found the New School, in NYC).