The Atherton Library and the Wednesday Town Council Meeting

From: Rick DeGolia
Date: July 24, 2012 5:14:26 PM PDT
To: Bill Widmer, Elizabeth Lewis, Jim Dobbie, Jerry Carlson, Kathy McKeithen
Cc: Didi Fisher
Subject: The Atherton Library and the Wednesday Town Council Meeting

Dear members of the Town Council:

I am writing to you for the first time, notwithstanding my having lived in Atherton for the past 12 years and my family having lived in Lindenwood for more than 40 years before that.

First, I am extremely disappointed that you have scheduled this very important town council meeting for 4pm in the afternoon.  You had to do this knowing that it would necessarily exclude many, many potential attendees who are concerned Atherton residents but who have to work and don't have the freedom to leave our jobs to correct the misjudgments of our elected representatives, no matter how much we would like to.  For myself, I live on Clay Drive and work in San Francisco.  I haven't attended a Town Council meeting, but I would have attended this one.  Please read these comments into the record at the Wednesday meeting.

We all know that the controversy regarding the library, its recommended placement in the Holbrook-Palmer Park and the issues surrounding this controversy have been extremely polarizing for the citizens of Atherton.  As our elected representatives, you should want to provide us residents with as complete, transparent and open a picture as you can.  The idea of building a new library is a tremendous opportunity for our community.  Of course, it is made much easier by the funds for the project being dedicated library funds that come from county taxes, but it nevertheless is a huge opportunity to gather input and ideas from your constituents to design something that can have a huge forward looking impact on all Athertonians.  And what an enormous, smart resource you have in the residents of Atherton to accomplish that task.  I appreciate everything that the library commission has done, but this isn't a finished project.  The Commission has built a foundation and established a framework for the engagement of many Atherton residents in this project.  They should be very happy with that accomplishment.  But this is only the beginning.  What has erupted is an enormous controversy principally about the library's location and secondarily about the town's needs and the form and content of the new library.

Rather than see this controversy as the extremely unfortunate event as you seem to view it, essentially as an imposition on your time and possibly a challenge to your authority, you should see this as a tremendous opportunity.  This is an opportunity to organize the people of Atherton as you have probably never seen before.  And, frankly, this isn't such a HUGE issue, but you now have an enormous number of people organized by this controversy.  Use this opportunity to further stimulate our population.  Open yourselves up to your constituency and restart this entire process.  Please, provide some leadership.  Rather than seeing this as the end, see this as the beginning.  Use this opportunity to get many more people involved in evaluating and designing what the new library will be and where it will be located.  Please don't take this down the path of a challenge to your authority.  Your authority is meaningless to most of us.  REALLY, we couldn't care less.  But if you help invigorate this community and rethink what this library project can be, you could launch us in a really meaningful direction.  Shouldn't our new library project seriously assess what the library of the 21st century should look like, how it can most effectively touch people and what it can do for our community, using all of today's and tomorrow's technology.  This is a project that be used to invigorate our community in a tremendously positive way. 

Please don't go down the narrow, paranoid path of stating the ballot proposition language in such a manner that you believe will most likely generate the votes as you want them.  This needs to be the most open ended question that it can be so that the people of Atherton can explore their thoughts and their creativity.  If you narrow this language in a manipulative way, then this language will be more about you, than about giving the citizens of Atherton an opportunity to explore this library project as being about them and their needs. 

Thank you, Rick DeGolia