When users of Facebook enter information about themselves into the website’s system, one question deals with relationships.
Users have a number of choices: married, single, in a relationship, divorced, widowed or “it’s complicated.”
Seems a bit redundant to me because most relationships are somewhat complicated — at least the more interesting ones.
Take the relationship between the city of Bangor and the Bangor Public Library. It’s got some legs to it, being nearly 130 years old. It was in 1883 that the Mechanics Association approached city officials and recommended joining up to form a public library.
The library is a nonprofit entity, separate from the city yet reliant on city funds and clearly providing city residents with an immeasurably beneficial resource for free.
The city, hence its taxpayers, foot just about 60 percent of the library’s annual budget, yet the employees are not city employees. The library has its own nine-member board, which is independent of the city, yet the City Council appoints three members of that board.
There is all kinds of room for snags in the relationship.
Yet it has prevailed — through World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, the Vietnam War, the energy crisis, and so on. It’s prevailed when good leaders were in charge and when, shall we say, more questionable ones were.
So I’m thinking it will survive the Occupy Bangor movement, which peaked in the city for a couple of months last fall.
The group, formed in the same vein as Occupy Wall Street, tented out in Peirce Park, adjacent to the library, for a while, a violation of the city’s curfew in public parks. The city eventually told the group it could no longer spend nights in the park, so some of its members moved a few steps over the line onto library property.
The city didn’t really want the library to allow the protesters to be able to set up their tents and spend nights on the library lawn. But the library board voted 6-2 to allow them to since it had no policy forbidding it, because it is mandated by the courts to provide a forum for peaceful protests, and because the majority of board members felt it important that the library support free speech.
By the first of December, with cold weather coming on and questions about insurance liability, the board voted again and chose to ask the protesters to leave. They did.
That was pretty much the end of it until last Thursday, when at a council budget workshop, council Chairman Cary Weston suggested the library’s funding could be at stake since the library board “purposely chose to be contrary to city policy” during the movement.
Weston’s questions about why the board took the action it did despite the city’s opposition were not inappropriate. The board was before it seeking $1.3 million. Many people in the city had the same questions and he felt it his duty as a city councilor to ask them.
But Weston’s tone was unnecessarily contentious.
He came off as a bit of a bully as he sat across the table from Library President Norman Minsky, Dr. Frank Bragg and Library Director Barbara McDade.
The library board voted about seven months ago. The tents came down six months ago, yet Weston said last Thursday’s budget workshop was the first time he had the opportunity to ask the board members about their decision.
He told me Friday that he had posed those questions to McDade, who never answered him. She denies ever being asked. Who knows?
Also on Friday, Weston said perhaps officials of the library and the city should meet more than once a year around the budget negotiation table.
Certainly, if the city was so upset over the library’s decision to allow the protesters to move onto its property that it may reconsider its funding of the library, that conversation should have been held sooner than six months after the fact.
The library receives significant city funding, but it does have its own board. The council’s appointees to that board have one vote each, just like the other board members.
Does it depend on the city? On the taxpayer? You bet. Just as the city and the taxpayers depend on it.
It should receive significant city funding. The city proudly holds it up as one of its most valuable institutions. It offers a free service to city residents, and even when other libraries across the country are feeling irrelevant, the Bangor Public Library continues to flourish, serving about 800 visitors a day, providing space for 470 nonlibrary-related meetings last year, and working to digitize and preserve centuries worth of historical documents.
McDade has been diligent in keeping up with technology to try to ensure the library’s relevance, thereby keeping it open for those many citizens who depend on it.
Is the relationship between the city and the library complicated? It is.
But it has been a pretty good one for the last century or so and should continue to be.
It appears that rather then this being between the Bangor Public Library and The City of Bangor it is more between Cary Weston and his highly inflated opinion of himself and The Bangor Public Library. I will put my money on the Library over Mr. Weston any day.
Mr. Weston was acting on behalf of taxpayers that contacted him as he should. There is more than one side to this story. I believe in free speech for “all”. Not just a select group. And, there are proper channels and permits to be gotten to do anything. And, we ALL need to do it properly.
So which group did the library say “no” to?
As for permits, nobody needs a permit to be on the library grounds.
The sad part of this whole situation that neither the library (Board and Director) nor the city council had better communication with each other than this on the subject of OWS. Obviously more work needs to be done by both sides. Continuing with the current methodology is broken and both sides need some pro-activity to keep it from getting worse.
The drama that currently exists is the product only of a passive-aggressive move by one of Bangor’s more vocal city council members. Weston could have raised the occupy issue with library staff anytime, but he waited to ambush them at a budget meeting. That’s weak.
The library will be an essential part of our community long after the current council members are forgotten.
I am a big fan of the Bangor Public Library. However, it is my personal belief that this article is making a big deal out of a few comments that were stated and at least some of the quotes were originally taken out of context. I also believe that the Council identifies the Bangor Public Library as a invaluable resource in which our community benefits from on a daily basis. This year the City could face a $1,100,000 shortfall imposed on us by Governor Paul LePage’s line-item veto. We might have to tighten our belts, but I believe if this happens that the pain will be shared amongst all aspects of the budget and not solely on the back of our library.
charlie, it’s bad enough we have to read articles in the BDN about you, so please do not post so we have to read your politically driven agenda comments as well. you don’t have to go home, just go away.
I believe the availability of this comment section applies equally to Charlie as it does to you or me. Your ad hominem attack adds nothing to the discussion.
While I agree with you that Charlie has the right to post here (even though he has a tendency towards denying speech to others) I disagree with you on the “ad hominem attack” part. Never in my 30 plus years of council watching have I been so thoroughly disgusted with the City Council membership. The notion that inept children are in charge of my tax dollars is really disconcerting.
Thank God for a decent city staff.
Seems “free speech” only applies to some – not all?
The reason that the paper is making a ‘big deal’ out of the comments that were stated, is that those comments are a big deal. The library is important to this community and Weston has influence over it’s funding.
Much ado about nothing? You have a city council chairman suggesting that funds, funds which give Bangor citizens access to the BPL, be pulled because the BPL didn’t play the game the way the city council wanted despite the fact that the city council has no legal authority to direct the library in its actions. Wonder if the city council would do that for any other private business, say for example, the business was a vendor to the city and hired someone that Cary Weston didn’t like?
Bangor Public Library did in the end ask OWS to leave because of liability issues. Seems to me those same liability issues should have been apparent to the Bangor Public Library from the beginning. So for now were all left to wonder why.
So, Mr. Weston, let’s try this scenario-the city cuts library funding, the library stops allowing residents of Bangor access unless they pay an individual fee. Seems fair to me. After all, we wouldn’t want to charge people, like YOU, who don’t use the library, now would we? Maybe we shouldn’t charge all those people who never drive on X,Y, or Z roads to build and maintain them. And, of course, some of us have never called the fire department or the police department, so why should we be taxed? And since the library is not a city department, has no city employees, and does not sit on city property, so where do you get off trying to tell them how to do their jobs?