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).

Letter from Council to Ohio Board of Regents

At our meeting last week, the Village Council unanimously voted to send this letter, which I drafted, to the Chancellor of the Ohio Board of Regents and other state, local, and regional officials:


To the Honorable Eric Fingerhut, Chancellor of the Ohio Board of Regents:

We, the Village Council of Yellow Springs, in one of our first Resolutions of the new year, Resolution 2008-04, have expressed our support for the combined efforts of Antioch University and the Antioch College Continuation Corporation to come to an agreement that will keep Antioch College operating. Specifically, we expressed our support for Antioch College Continuation Corporation’s efforts to seek clarification on the issue of maintaining the Certificate of Authorization with the Ohio Board of Regents, as long as the standards outlined in Administrative Code 3333 continue to be met in the future.

We have therefore directed our Village Manager, Eric Swansen, to write a letter to you and to state and local officials expressing our concerns about this important decision, particularly focusing on the likely economic impact of even a temporary closure of the college on our village.

With this letter, we not only underscore Eric’s careful analysis of the gravity of this decision for our village’s economic sustainability, but also wish to emphasize the importance of Antioch College as the key institution in our village’s 155-year history, and its importance our current social, cultural, and artistic liveliness, which is key to our village’s attractiveness to so many people.

As Eric notes, Antioch College has been, historically, the powerful engine behind many industries that have made their home in Yellow Springs and the region during the twentieth century. YSI, the Antioch Company, Morris Bean & Company, Anthrotech, and others, all got their start at Antioch and today remain vital employers in our village. They have, with Antioch College and University, continued to help draw in a highly educated, democratically engaged, and artistic demographic that uniquely characterizes Yellow Springs as a village in Southwest Ohio.

Perhaps less tangibly, the ideals and philosophy of Arthur Morgan, who revitalized the College in the first half of the 20th century, have helped create a community that sustains successful non-profit ventures that comport with his vision of the small community, rich with green spaces and human-scale endeavors, as vital to democratic life and a sustainable civilization—including, most directly, groups as Community Service, Inc., the Glen Helen Ecology Institute, but also many others that provide valuable educational and other services to the region, attracting significant numbers of visitors to conferences, camps, and other events.

Antioch College is vital to our current identity as an arts community, which is both a source of economic revenue for our village, and, we believe, vital to the broader human need to craft creative responses to the problems we face in our world. Not only do many resident artists in town—not to mention many internationally-known artists, actors, and musicians—have Antioch ties, but many key events vital to our town’s cultural life are held on the campus.

The annual African American Cross-Cultural Works Blues Fest is held in the Amphitheatre on campus each September, attracting business vendors throughout the region to the festival area and emphasizing to the thousands who attend for the wonderful food and music the value of diversity in our world. The Yellow Springs Kids’ Playhouse—which provides children from the entire region with the opportunity to learn vital skills and perform and produce original theatrical works, at almost no cost to themselves or their families—uses Antioch College theatre facilities for all its efforts. These are just two annual arts events of many others held in Antioch facilities during the year. They not only draw in vital revenue and attract regional tourists, but help build and sustain community life.

Moreover, campus facilities are a part of our daily life as a community: many residents use the swimming pool and physical education facilities as part of their daily exercise regime. Many families regularly walk in the Glen. Students and residents alike use the Antioch College library. Most recently, in collaboration with Antioch Alumna Coretta Scott King and the Martin Luther King, Jr., family, the Coretta Scott King Center for Cultural and Intellectual Freedom was established on the campus with a key goal of helping both Antioch and Yellow Springs imagine and work towards socially-just local, national and global communities. The center brings artists and speakers to the area, and many local groups now use their facilities to try to carry forth the King family vision in Southwest Ohio.

We are therefore gravely concerned not only about the practical problems that may come with prospect of a vacated campus in the heart of our village for at least several years into the future, but also about the loss of this historical grounding for our cultural and artistic life, and our very identity as a village. We urge you to carefully consider the importance of the continued existence of both Antioch University and Antioch College to our village life as you evaluate their request for continued accreditation.


Sincerely,

The Yellow Springs Village Council