Wizard Marks writes: "In my mind, the covetous looks at the Library referendum money by the city council and the mayor set off red flags."
Carol: Well it is a bit confusing because the referendum money is not money that they can substitute to buy cops or fire fighters or fix any of the City's budget woes. You cannot pay for cops with bond proceeds nor does cutting the library project allow you to levy more for cops. There are other agendas going on to try to kill this project. Wizard Marks writes again: "Or, can we change to a less extravagant plan that fulfills our needs to house the library we already have?" Jim Mork: Um. No. The DESIGN was bad, not the price. If any MISTAKE was made, let's NOT do it again. Let's NOT buy platinum-priced architects, as if the books would only be happy if the building they are in shows up in architecture magazines around the world. Carol: I am somewhat pleased but also disconcerted that people feel that hiring Pelli was extravagant and that the building is extravagant. Pelli was the cheapest bidder, lower than even a home-town team and even benchmarking his costs against other buildings, his costs came out very reasonable. Also, the building costs are quite modest when benchmarked against other buildings. One of the marks of a great architect is that they can do great things with a modest budget and that is what Pelli has been doing. So in a perverse way I am pleased that people feel that they are getting too much for a quite tight budget for the size of building being constructed. Carol: Also people have commented that the glass outer walls are extravagant and actually glass exteriors on large buildings are the cheapest way to go. We wanted to have more stone on the exterior but the cost of that was way way out of our budget reach. Carol: The size of the library is really sized to the size of the collection. There are assumptions about discarding out of date materials in that sizing but there really is not the ability to dramatically shrink the building without doing things like not having a fiction room or a children's room. Tim Bohnam I can't imagine that the Library books would weigh much more than all the stuff that Sears used to sell in it's Lake St. building. It may be possible to retrofit the Sears building but you would have several problems. First you would have a building that was not designed to be a library and thus would be more expensive to operate. For people who want to save money, a building designed for its purpose will always be cheaper to operate than one not designed for that. Second, you will have left the downtown (both the 100,000+ people who work downtown and the 25,000+ who live downtown) without a library. Third, you would lose the synergy of being downtown whether it is teens hanging out at Teen Central, being seen and being seen then hanging out at City Center or parents taking their kids skating and then to the library or someone who works downtown going to the library on their lunch break. There is a nexus of activity downtown and the library really needs to be part of that. Jim Mork writes: "We cannot keep big pieces of the collection in untouchable storage past 2006. " Carol: When we made the decision to move to interim location, we knew that we were sacrificing a part of the functionality of the library when we put a big chunk of the collection into storage. It would be a complete outrage to make that permanent, crippling the library permanently. Carol commentary: One thing that I am surprised that no one has brought up is what does an election mean when 106,000 people can vote for something and have nine people overturn it. How will an election have any meaning in this City again when the will of so many people can be so callously tossed aside by a small number of people? I think that this really will be a gut check as to whether or not we believe in this City any more. Do we do the things that make this a good place to live or do we cripple ourselves for forever? Because if we let this ago now, it isn't coming back. Carol Becker Longfellow TEMPORARY REMINDER: 1. Send all posts in plain-text format. 2. Cut as much of the post you're responding to as possible. ________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
