Saturday Evening — Mourning For Section 16
by Chuck Ring (GadAbout-BlogAlot ©2008)Â
Quote Freely From the Article — Leave The Pseudonym Alone
Since shortly after Edgewood was incorporated in 1999, it has been the town’s policy to move forward to develop a center for town facilities on Section 16. It has been the policy, but nothing has been done toward that end. One of the facilities to be constructed on Section 16 was a library, either as a library alone or as some sort of combination facility. The governing body recently voted to move the library from its location off of Old 66 to a building adjacent to State Road 344 rather than to apply available funds to a new library on Section 16. The budgeted cost for this move, which included monthly lease payments and monies for remodeling amount to at least $70,000 for the first year, if there is not a cost overrun for the modifications. Of course, monies for the lease, maintenance and utilities will continue as operation of the library goes forward. Additionally, money for a full time librarian salary and benefits, along with a library assistant’s salary and benefits has been budgeted.
While I and others support the idea of a town library, we did not support the move mentioned above as we believed that it made economic sense to build a completely new library and money spent on the move and other elements of the library at its new location amount to throwing money away that could have been more sensibly spent toward a new library on Section 16. It should be said that the mayor and other volunteers involved in preparing the new location and moving the books to the new location deserve our thanks and appreciation and this new location for the library will be fine for a while, but the governing body needs to start now to plan a new library for Section 16, preferably so that it is ready within a three year period.
What might stop such planning is the fruition of a rumor that some in the governing body are ready to lease even more of the “Pitttman” building (new library location) for other town facilities. The mayor, for one, has been heard to say he wants to move the police department and other offices to the Pittman building. It is difficult to understand the reason for this desire, when the town should be focusing on completing the planned facilities on Section 16. Not only are we wasting money by leasing when we could be building; the longer we wait, the more the facilities will cost. The town should be able to go forward right now and pay the debt service on the facilities through gross receipts tax proceeds. Since the mayor and all of the remaining governing body members know that waiting will only serve to have more money spent, it is difficult to understand why they do not move to get moving.
Maybe one or more members of the governing body will let us know why we are stalling on Section 16 or perhaps they can invite our financial adviser to a workshop or regular meeting so he can again point out the foolhardiness of waiting to develop Section 16. How about it mayor or councilors? Do you have any inclination to get with the program?