Interview with Mayor Michael Harris

The interview two months in the making is finally here! I would like to thank Mayor Harris for his participation and for his help in giving some clarity to the many issues surrounding the Pleasant Hill Library's current financial woes. I would also like to thank City of Pleasant Hill Public Information Officer Martin Nelis for all his great work in making this interview happen. Without further ado...the interview...

Since this is an interview for a book blog, lets start with some book questions.

1. Who are some of your favorite authors?

I am an avid reader and have many favorite authors. Among my favorite authors are: Doris Kearns Goodwin, Walter Isaacson, David McCullough, David Liss, Isabelle Allende, John Grisham, Brad Meltzer, and Mitch Albom

2. What are some of your favorite books?

Doris Kearns Goodwin: Team of rivals ; Wait till next year

Walter Isaacson: Einstein ; Benjamin Franklin

David McCullough: 1776 ;The path between the seas

David Liss: A conspiracy of paper

Isabelle Allende: Portrait in sepia ; The sum of our days

Mitch Albom: Tuesdays with Morrie


3. What was the last good book you read?

The book of lies by David Meltzer

Moving on to the library budget issue...


4. Can you explain for our readers a little about the library money for green zone trade off that was proposed by the county?

As part of the County's Fiscal Year 2009/10 budget, the County reduced funding for the Contra Costa County Library system and recommended transferring most of the cost for facility management to the cities in which the libraries are located. If cities did not agree to fund the facility costs, library services would be severely curtailed at that location. In the case of Pleasant Hill, this cost amounted to $147,718 for the 2009/10 fiscal year. This presented a challenge to the City of Pleasant Hill because it is also struggling to maintain public services with limited financial resources. Because of its desire to maintain the maximum amount of library services as possible, however, the City of Pleasant Hill proposed a creative solution for an alternative funding source. In exchange for the County continuing to fund the facility management costs that otherwise would be the City's responsibility, the City proposed to fund a Waste Reduction Information & Outreach Program (also known as the "Green Zone") at the Library for the same dollar amount utilizing funds from the City's recycling fund. This solution was hailed by library staff as an innovative and effective way of keeping the library open while, at the same time, providing valuable education and information to citizens regarding the importance of recycling.

5. It seemed as though the City Council had mixed reasons for their decision to vote down the budget proposal. It was unclear to those of us in attendance if the reason was because the city had a lack of funds or if the city thought that the bill should be paid by the county. Which one is it? If the city had the money, would they have paid for the library or would they have pushed that this was a county problem?

The City Council did not vote down the library budget proposal. Rather, at its meeting on July 13, 2009, the City Council voted to approve the funding level as mentioned above to establish the "Green Zone" at the library. The Council also voted to provide additional funding of $25,733 to keep the library open for 7 hours on each Monday through the end of September. As a result of these actions, the Council was able to ensure that the library in Pleasant Hill would remain open for 6 days a week for a total of 35 hours. Otherwise, the library hours would have been cut back to 28 hours. Both of these options were recommended to the City Council in the staff report presented at that meeting and the Council did not vote on any other budget proposal in relation to the library. It is not possible to project what the City would have done if it had additional funds in its General Fund as that issue was not before the City Council.

6. If it is a county problem, what steps are we taking as a city to get more county funding for our library?

The County has made it very clear to the City Council that due to the current budget crisis facing the County, it is not possible for the County to provide additional funding to bring back library hours to the levels prior to July 1, 2009. These cuts in library hours are occurring at most libraries throughout Contra Costa County - this issue is not isolated to Pleasant Hill.

7. Continuing with it being a county issue, with the library literally across the street from the Walnut Creek city line, and roughly 25% of the library's circulation coming from Walnut Creek residents, has the city attempted to join with Walnut Creek to help with funding?

The numbers of Walnut Creek residents using the PH Library should decline once their new library opens in downtown Walnut Creek. Nonetheless, the City of Walnut Creek has recently implemented severe budget cuts and is having problems finding the money for operational and maintenance costs for its new library. It is highly unlikely that the City of Walnut Creek will contribute any funds towards the operation of the PH Library.

8. If it is a money issue, has the city considered proposing a bond measure to pay for the library like it did recently for the teen and senior centers?

The recent bond measure, known as Measure E, was placed on the ballot by the PH Recreation & Park District, which is a completely separate entity from the City of Pleasant Hill. The City has no plans currently for any bond measures.

9. Finally, I would be remiss if I did not ask this last question. In regards to the vote itself, at the time some community members in attendance remarked that it was in poor taste to have third grader Kevin Vasgerdsian call for the vote that limited the library's hours and staff. Looking back, would you have done anything differently in this regard?

By your question, I think you may have misinterpreted what actually happened. As indicated above, the City Council did not vote to limit the library hours, but rather voted to provide additional funding so library hours could be increased to 35 hours per week. (The City Council did not vote on staffing.)

Please allow me to provide a little background on the ceremonial "Mayor for the Day" program. This program was designed as a way to support local schools and raise additional funds during their annual auctions. We try to give the "Mayor for the Day" the opportunity to participate in the Council meeting in a meaningful way to make the experience as valuable as possible. One of the "ceremonial duties" is to call the roll for items on the council agenda.

As ceremonial "Mayor for the Day, " Kevin Vasgerdsian called for a vote to provide

$147,718 in City funding for the library so that the library could remain open for 35 hours a week. Additional funding of $25,733 allowed the library to remain open 42 hours a week during July, August and September of 2009. This vote helped guarantee continued operation of the library at the maximum number of hours fiscally possible and the provision of a new recycling program at a time when both the County and the City are struggling to provide essential public services to its citizens. I believe it was appropriate for the "Mayor for the Day" to call the roll on a vote that allows children and their families greater access to the library than they would have had otherwise.


10. Thank you very much for your responses. They were very helpful in clearing up some misconceptions. I guess on some issues it is a case of seeing glasses half empty versus half full. One last question though that remains is what does the future hold for the Pleasant Hill library? When, if ever, do you expect it to regain its former staffing and hours? Does it all relate to what happens with the economy? Is there the possibility of further cuts next year? What kind of creative solutions is the city and/or library coming up with to help the library?

Good question, but not one that is easy for the City to answer. Since the County funds and runs the Library, it's hard to know what their financial picture and plans will be in the future. We will certainly continue to work cooperatively with the Library staff and administration to try everything we can to keep the Library open at its current level. We are also working on other creative ideas like the "Green Zone." Unfortunately, it all does relate to the economy-which no one seems to be able to figure out. Thanks again for your continued interest in our Library. Take care.

Please leave your comments, I'd love to know what you think.

Interview update...

Sorry for the tease. I have a few follow up questions for the Mayor. Once that is ready I'll post the entire interview. Sorry again.

Interview With The Mayor

Mayor Michael Harris has completed our interview! I will get it ready for publication and have it posted by tomorrow morning!

Name that Author

I got 16 out of 28. I'm sure you can do much better!

http://www.sporcle.com/games/namethatauthor.php

Pleasant Hill Library Book Sale

September 12th the Friends of the Pleasant Hill Library are having a book sale. The location of the sale will be at 75 Santa Barbara road right behind the library. This is a great way to support your local library!

Mr. Cellophane

I hate to admit, but I needed to take a bit of a breather from Frankenstein. I'll get back to it soon but my brain just needed a rest. For my mental relaxation I turned to one of my favorite guilty pleasures, Daniel X. The book is roughly 200 pages of adolescent superhero alien blood and guts.

The author of the Daniel X series is 62 year old James Patterson. Even more so than the first Daniel X book (The Dangerous Days of Daniel X), Watch the Skies is a painfully transparent attempt by a man in his 60's trying to write a relevant book for young teens. There are numerous references to 70's classic rock songs and an even greater amount of current pop culture references that are forced into the dialogue which are unnecessary and out of place.

I think that Patterson (who has co-authored both Daniel X books) was probably asked to write a series of books chronicling the life of a teen boy with super-natural powers and two dead parents (who also had special powers) to fill the hole left in the book market from the ending of the Harry Potter collection. I'm sure if I was a bigger Harry Potter fan I could a lot more similarities.

Given all of this however, I'm still going to be reading the next Daniel X book, Daemons and Druids, when it comes out late next year. Maybe I should check into rehab.

Question?

I am about 100 hard pages into Frankenstein and I began to wonder if great writing is enough to make a great book. What I mean is that if a story is bad but written very well is the book bad or good?

There can be no question that Mary Shelley's writing skills are outstanding, but the story itself is dull and boring. It is easy to see why all of the adaptations of the book never stuck to the original story. If they did, the Frankenstein monster, besides speaking like a Shakespearean actor and having a far greater vocabulary then I could ever hope to have, would only be in the film for about 5 minutes. The other hour and a half would be Dr. Frankenstein walking around lamenting his dreaded and cursed creation.

Anyway, back to the question. Is it more likely to have a good book with bad writing and a great story or a good book with great writing and a bad story? Or are they both equally terrible?


PS-I still have about 110 pages left of Frankenstein so my fingers are crossed that I get more monster and less doctor.

The word is their bond

From a rare friendship, a book club for the homeless is born

By Jenna Russell, Globe Staff | July 5, 2009

At the crest of Beacon Hill in a well-appointed room, the Tuesday morning book club is tearing a novel apart.

The critique, on this warm early summer day, is merciless, and as it heats up, the meeting crackles with complaints. There should have been more clues to help the reader unravel the mystery, Donnie insists. Ned, between bites of a glazed doughnut, dismisses a main character as unbelievable. Rob is irked by the same character’s inconsistencies.

“For someone who knows everything about her son, she doesn’t know a damn thing,’’ Rob says, his voice dark with disappointment.

The men drinking coffee at the round wooden table are dressed casually in sweat shirts, jeans, and sneakers. Some of their faces are lined beyond their years. But as they deftly flip through paperbacks assessing literary merit, there is no sign their lives are anything but normal.

For two lively hours every Tuesday morning, in a church meeting room with old oil portraits, they are book club members first and homeless people second.

The story of the book club, now in its 10th month, is a tale of ordinary city life upended. It began with a stunningly unlikely friendship, between two men from different worlds: Peter Resnik, a high-powered lawyer on his way to work, and Rob, a homeless man guarding a friend’s shopping cart on Boston Common. Through months of daily conversations, that began with jokes and sports talk and gradually delved deeper, they found a common interest: literature. And when they saw the bridge that they had built, they recognized its potential for others.

In a short time, they say, the book club has proved its power to reach homeless people and build their confidence. Emboldened by its success, Ron Tibbetts, a Beacon Hill church deacon and longtime homeless outreach worker, has launched plans to replicate it. His new nonprofit group, the Oasis Coalition, aims to establish dozens of small social groups citywide, filling the gaps left by large, institutional programs that offer the homeless food and shelter but little or no personal connection.

“It’s five people in a book group, not 5,000 people fed, but it’s five people I can pull aside and talk to,’’ Tibbetts said.

When talk flows at the book club, the dynamic that emerges is pure and powerful. The members are equals, linked by what they read and respected for their insights. Their discussions, held at Swedenborgian Church on the Hill, are both a stimulus and a respite for people used to staying focused on survival - where to sleep and how to stay dry - rather than the themes and symbols of fiction.

Last Tuesday, they tackled O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi,’’ mulling the idea of objects as identity. Donnie, 47, said he understood the insecurities of Della, the character who cuts her hair and sells it to buy her beloved a watch chain.

“When I was a kid, I wore my hair long, and I took pride in it,’’ he told the group, leaning back into a plump settee. “One night, my mother came in drunk and cut it off, right down to the scalp, and after that I wasn’t the same person anymore. My confidence went out the window.’’

A former Marine who has been homeless off and on since he developed health problems that left him unable to work, Donnie said he likes the camaraderie, and the normalcy, of the book club.

“We’re real people,’’ he said. “You see us on the street and the sidewalk, and a lot of people think the homeless are dirty and drunk, but even those people, there’s a soul in there.’’

. . .

To Peter Resnik, the downtown lawyer on his way to work, the homeless people he saw on the Common did not become real all at once. He talked to Rob and Rob’s friend Chris for months - often, in the beginning, about basketball - before he saw them as friends, and worked up the courage to ask whether they wanted to get off the streets.

Given the distance between their two worlds, it seems extraordinary that they ever talked at all. “It struck me as amazing,’’ said Rob.

Resnik, 64, woke each morning in his home in the Back Bay, where he had moved with his wife and three children from Hingham. An English major at Yale, he moved to Boston for law school and joined the global firm McDermott, Will & Emery, where he rose to prominence trying high-profile product liability cases. He represented one of the makers of the Fen-Phen diet drug, and the foam manufacturer sued by victims of the Rhode Island nightclub fire.

Tall, trim, and quietly good-humored, Resnik almost always walked to his office, on the 34th floor of a gleaming State Street tower. Whenever he had time, he took the scenic, slightly longer route through the Common.

Rob, 50, rose each day from a sleeping bag rolled out on the stained sidewalk beside Tremont Street, where he slept in the doorway of an Army recruiting station. A Woburn native, he attended Catholic high school, joined the Army, and later worked in warehouses and as a courier. Six or seven years ago, feeling overworked and exhausted, he was fired from his job for taking too much sick time, he said. He fell behind on his rent and started living on the streets.

Compact and wiry, with cropped gray hair and a shy but agreeable nature, Rob headed to the Common early every morning after being roused by the Tremont Street businesses opening.

There, on a maple-shaded walkway near the playground, the homeless man stood each day and greeted passersby, who ignored him, insulted him, or gave him money. Resnik always said hello, and one spring day two years ago, he stopped to talk.

The lawyer says he wasn’t on a philanthropic mission. He struggles to explain what it was that drew his interest. But day after day, talking with Rob and Rob’s friend, what he found was not what he expected. The homeless men kept up-to-date on sports and current events. They looked after each other, and watched out for others on the streets.

And Rob, he discovered - Rob liked to read.

Resnik brought him a copy of “Water for Elephants,’’ a novel set during the Great Depression, about a veterinary student who joins a traveling circus. Then he brought him “The Kite Runner.’’ Standing on the Common, they talked about the books. And, there the idea for the book club was born.

Resnik buys the books, Rob makes the coffee, and Tibbetts leads the discussions and recruits readers, toting extra volumes in his backpack when he roams the streets. Because their lives are unstable, the roster of participants is always changing. The club has included people staying in shelters and with friends, and others given rooms through city or state programs. The number has ranged from four or five to a dozen. The members interviewed for this story asked that their last names not be used.

Since their first meeting in September, they have read “Water for Elephants,’’ “Angela’s Ashes’’ by Frank McCourt, and “A Monk Swimming’’ by McCourt’s brother Malachy. They read “The Glass Castle,’’ a memoir by Jeannette Walls, whose tale of her neglectful parents left them deeply troubled, and at Donnie’s request, they read essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson, an assignment almost everyone else found tough slogging. Some of their best discussions centered on “All Souls: A Family Story from Southie,’’ Michael Patrick MacDonald’s memoir of his childhood in South Boston.

At the start, Resnik offered to bring lunch each week.

The founding members of the book club turned him down, and settled on coffee and doughnuts instead. They had enough free meals, they said, they wanted something else - camaraderie and stimulating talk.

“You can’t solve the problem of homelessness, but that doesn’t mean you can’t help some people,’’ said Resnik. “You can do something, with minimal sacrifice, if you stay with it.’’

. . .

For people trying hard just to find a place to sleep, a book club may be nice, but it isn’t always easy. For starters, people on the streets can’t read after dark. In shelters, noise and chaos shatter concentration. When Donnie stayed at the Long Island Shelter in Boston, he read on a bench by the showers, the quietest spot he could find in the complex.

Just hanging on to a book is difficult when you have to carry everything you own. As much as reading meant to him, said Donnie, he had to prioritize the things he needed for survival.

“If it’s a book or socks,’’ he said, “I’m pitching the book.’’

The struggle pays off, book club members said, in the rush of accomplishment they carry from each meeting.

Last week, Tibbetts told the group about a prospective member with a problem: a homeless man who longs to devour books, but reads at a fourth-grade level.

“Get him here,’’ said Donnie, as Rob nodded agreement. “It’s a good start, being here.’’

For Rob, the unexpected friendship he forged on the Common has been transformative. When Resnik learned that an old traffic ticket had blocked his homeless friend from getting a room through the city, he drove him to a court in Palmer, where he represented him pro bono and resolved the case. Because of that kindness, Rob is off the streets. He has found a part-time job as a church custodian and volunteers his time serving meals to homeless people.

Resnik, meanwhile, is helping to raise money to replicate the book club.

“You can walk by somebody who you know is going to ask you for a buck, but if you know their name, you can’t walk by,’’ the lawyer said. “You can’t sleep comfortably if someone you know is sleeping outside.’’

Jenna Russell can be reached at jrussell@globe.com.

Thank You!

Thank you to all of those who raised their voice! The mayor has agreed to an interview, not a conversation but an actual interview! The details have yet to be worked out, but we should be able to get it done in the next week (hopefully).

The Big Bang Theory- Time Share-Time Machine

Book Give-Away Update

I just got back from the book give away and the pickings are quite slim. I'd say there is about 10% of their young adult books and about 80% of their adult non-fiction left over. I went last year towards the end of week two and they had about five times as many books available. I think word is starting to spread (which I guess is a good thing!).

Despite the limited selection I still managed to find 56 books to add to my classroom library.

I highly recommend going soon if you haven't gone yet!

Here is the address of the library:
1750 Oak Park Blvd
Pleasant Hill, CA 94523

The book give-away is going on behind the building in their loading dock area.

The Inspiration Machine

Before The Time Machine I have to admit that I was pretty intimidated by anything written pre-1900. Its true that I am a Government teacher and have to translate the US Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and Federalist Papers to urban high school students with 8th grade reading levels or lower (about 5% are at grade level). However reading a novel in this language is not exactly my idea of fun.

No longer!

After acclimating to the old language, I found The Time Machine to be a brilliant little novel. Besides being incredibly creepy at times, The Time Machine has some great chapters on class struggle as well as evolutionary and economic theory.

Since finishing The Time Machine I have a new interest in these early classics and have now begun to read Mary Shelly's Frankenstein. Again it took about five or six pages to get the language down, but, just like The Time Machine, I am completely hooked!

As I still wait for Enemy Mine to arrive in the mail (one of the drawbacks of paperbackswap.com) I know that I have a great novel to enjoy in the mean time. Maybe I'll read Bram Stoker's Dracula next!

For Those Who Would Like To Contact City Hall

Several people have contacted me about how to get in touch with the mayor to voice their own concerns about his lack of communication on the library budget cuts issue.

Here is the contact info:

To email him:
http://www.ci.pleasant-hill.ca.us/forms.aspx?FID=74

To call:
(925) 671-5267, faxing to (925) 671-5238

Thank you for your support on this issue!

"In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends"--Martin Luther King, Jr.