Help! I Don't Know How To Be Without a Library.

From the Jackson County, Oregon web site, the final update for the night was posted just before midnight:

PRECINCTS COUNTED (OF 51) . . . . . . . . . . 51
REGISTERED VOTERS - TOTAL . . . . 110,952
BALLOTS CAST - TOTAL. . . . . . . . . . . . 58,588
VOTER TURNOUT - TOTAL . . . . . . . . . . 52.80%

15-75 Local Option Tax for Public Library Operations
JACKSON COUNTY

Yes . . . . . . . . . . . . 24,253 = 41.74%
No. . . . . . . . . . . . . 33,852 = 58.26%
Total. . . . . . . . . . . 58,105


We got the first half of the fifty-fifty requirement: The better than fifty percent turnout of registered voters. But for the second time in under a year, Jackson County, Oregon has said a resounding NO to a library funding levy.

It is going to take me a few hours, if not days to assimilate the understanding that I'll be without library resources for at least several more months. The earliest another measure can get on the ballot is September.

I don't know how to be without a library in my life!

My first memories of visiting the library are from the time my baby brother was still in a stroller. He was 22 months younger. So those memories go back to age three. I have very vivid memories of receiving my first library card at age five and then upgrading to a 13 year old's card with 'upstairs' privileges in the adult stacks. That was in Longview, Washington where I lived until I married just after my 21st birthday and since then I have lived and held cards in Oceanside, California,, Longview again, Jackson County, Oregon, Longview again, Sunnyvale, California and Jackson County again. During the late eighties I had a card with the Southern Oregon State College (now Southern Oregon University) in Ashland as well as the county card. In Longview in the late nineties I had a card with the Lower Columbia Community College as well as the city card.

Remind me again how I am supposed to do this. I know I worked out a plan and nothing has changed to alter its parameters, though there was a close call this past two weeks with the malware attack putting my laptop and relatively unhindered access to the Internet in jeopardy. Maybe I'll feel a bit better by tomorrow night, after I've had a chance to adjust to the let down of the slim hope I was holding onto; after I've had a chance to review my plan for how to live and continue my work for a time without library resources. It isn't a long-term plan though. If this is still going on a year from now I'll have to be reminded why I want to continue living in a community where vested interests are holding access to knowledge hostage and the majority of those who care enough to vote about it are A Ok with the idea.

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Turned my library levy ballot in here this morning. Phoenix City Hall now occupies the building which was the Phoenix Library a year ago. Our new library is being built on the lot where City Hall used to be. But will it ever open its doors?

Today is D-day for the library levy. Ballots must be turned in by 8PM which is less than three hours out now. To pass there needs to be better than a fifty percent turnout of registered voters plus better than fifty percent in favor. Word on the local news at five is that turnout is running at 48%. Close enough for hope but not close enough to relax. No word yet on how the votes are falling. Opinion on both sides has been strong and outspoken.


Nobody needs to guess where I stand.


I walked my ballot over to City Hall in Phoenix this morning, dropping it in the box just before nine. To do this, I had to stay up way past my usual bed time of late. I had hoped not to be leaving it to the last minute like that. The ballot arrived in the mail the same week the malware attack hit my laptop. Possibly the same day thought at the moment I can't quite remember whether the ballot arrived on Saturday the 28th or Monday the 30th. I will never forget the moment my laptop started blitzing the screen with browser windows and pop ups faster than I could close them. Just before 3AM that Saturday morning.


For over a week, I feared that I was about to loose access to the Internet and my files at the same time I was loosing access to the library. Panic is not a strong enough word to describe my state of mind. Over the next twelve days my laptop got at least as much attention as a newborn in intensive care. After a week of playing Whack-A-Mole with the malware, my husband was at his wits end and told me to start preparing for a probable reformatting of the hard drive. By which he meant for me to collect my personal files for back up. Since some of my files needing back up were still on the PC, I started working with them during the times the laptop was busy with scans or restarts.


One of the biggest backup projects on the PC was my email corrospondence trapped in the AOL software. I had discovered only after I had been using my laptop for three months that transferring AOL mail files from one computer to another would overwrite the files on the destination computer. I would have had to choose between the two years preceding my Dad's death while I was in Phoenix communicating with my parents and siblings three to five-hundred miles north of here, or the three months following his death while I was in Longview, Washington communicating with my husband here in Phoenix. Then there was the email related to web site admin on both. No way to choose. Thus the only way to salvage the PC email files was to copy and paste them into text files or save them as HTML pages.


I knew that project was going to be huge which was why I procrastinated on it so long and because it was hooked in my mind with the whole issue of backing up my files it tended make me avoid thinking about it. But this latest scare has really got my attention. I hope I never need another lesson in the importance of backing up your important files regularly. A lot of the stress of the last two weeks would have been avoided if a few keystrokes could have backed up my files.


I had been estimating that the PC email retrieval was going to take two or three night work sessions. Access to the PC for me is limited to between 9PM and 5AM. Or I can get back on it after my husband leaves for work on the days his mother also works--Tuesday through Friday. Which is what I did this morning because I had to stay up until I could walk the ballot over anyway. I had come very close to completing the project before five but had a couple dozen more emails to sift through and some double checking with my photo folders that I had already copied the pictures over to them. That took me a bit less than an hour after my husband left for work this morning. I estimate that I put in close to thirty hours on that project alone over the last ten days.


The email was the last of the files on the PC needing to be accounted for and organized for backing up. Now I can focus on the files on the laptop. And the good news is that the laptop is cooperating at the moment. The aberrant behavior has been nearly zip since Friday evening. There is hope we will not have to reformat the disk after all. But I refuse to loose the momentum or the motivation on the file back up project. I am still hoping to hit the target my husband set a week ago which was this coming Saturday. The day he was going to take the hard drive back to its out-of-the-box state.


But for the next several hours my focus is going to be on following the election returns on the local news. The fate of ballot measure 15-75 holds my fate in its hands. Life will go on without library access but wouldn't be a life I would recognize or feel at home in.

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Attention Jackson County Oregon

Attention Jackson County Oregon

Save Our Libraries

Yes on 15-75

The caption under the picture is a link to the local PAC set up to promote the levy measure on the May ballot for funding Jackson County Oregon's 15 branch library system for another three years.

Ballots will be mailed on April 28 and must be turned in by 8PM May 15. (Note: if mailing your ballot, be sure to mail in plenty of time. For those who have been used to dropping your ballots into the locked ballot boxes at your local library branch in past elections, here is the list of official drop sites established for this election.)

Final day new voter registration will be accepted for this election is April 24.

Here is a PDF of the voter pamplet.

Please Jackson County, Save our library system!

You can bet I'm going to have more to say about this over the next month.

So this evening marks one full week since the library doors were locked. I can still barely believe it. Meanwhile I am tending to the promise I made to myself the day I posted this Thursday Thirteen regarding the things in my life I have neglected in the four months between learning of the impending closure and the day the doors were locked. I am groping my way toward balance. Sleep and writing are the two things that have gotten the most attention this past week. With this post I congratulate myself for having posted every day for a week.

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Save Our Libraries

This is the picture now displayed on the home page of our library system's web site.

There is is a mixture of sadness and anger in our community this week. There is a strong consensus that loss of library access is not good for the community but there is not much consensus on what should be done about it.

The sadness needs little explanation. The anger is a complex cauldron.

Some of the anger is directed at the county officials because of a perception that funds have been mismanaged, or that they dithered too long in creating a replacement for the Federal safety net monies due to expire last year.

Some are angry with the Federal environmental laws and the 'loony tree-huggers' who filed suit after suit over the years to stop the logging on the Federal lands which was providing the income for the rural counties that then needed to be replaced with the 'safety net' money known as the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self Determination Act which expired in December when Congress failed to renew it.

Some are angry because they perceive the library closures as a blatant attempt by certain county officials to manipulate public sympathies against the logging restrictions and in favor of solutions that propose selling millions of acres of public land to create trust funds for the counties.

Besides sadness and anger there is anxiety on the part of supporters of county ballot measure 15-75 which would fund the libraries at current levels of service for another three years with a tax of 66 cents per $1000 of assessed property value. This is estimated to average about $9 per month for the average home owner in the county. Anxiety stems from several concerns, not the least of which is that tax measures are notoriously difficult to pass in Southern Oregon. Then there is the requirement of a better than 50% voter turnout with a better than 50% yes vote in order for the measure to pass and Southern Oregon is also known for low voter turnout. The fact that a similar levy garnered less than a 50% approval last November when hotly contested Federal Congressional and State Gubernatorial races provided a bigger draw than the election this May is expected to contributes to the anxiety.

Those who suspect that interest in last November's version of the levy was impacted by the hope then current that Congress would vote to renew the county safety net after the fall recess. A hope that was to be disabused. If that was the case then, a similar reluctance to pass the levy could be induced by the fact that a three year extension of the county monies has been inserted into the emergency appropriations bill for the Iraq war--the one Bush is threatening to veto because of the time lines it contains. But that D.C. imbroglio could drag out for several more weeks and it hasn't been decided yet whether, if it passes, the county monies would be forthcoming at the beginning of the fiscal year this summer or at the end of this year.


Nor does it help that county officials are murmuring to the effect that even if the levy passes it could be months, if not the beginning of next year before the libraries could be reopened because of the complexity of collecting and disbursing the money..

Thus it is that the campaign to save our libraries is going to be an uphill battle.

More information about the issues involved can be found on the website of the Association of Oregon Counties.

The Southern Oregon Library website is still hosting its infoblog which continues to post breaking news relevant to the library closure and personal testimonials. One post from January 27 is regularly updated with links to the most recent news from newspaper articles to TV broadcasts and even blogs. The newer links are added above the older links which makes this particular post a good resource for following the complexities of this story over time.

Meridith May's San Francisco Chronicle article is still one of the better overviews of the situation as it stood a month ago.

And Open Democracy, an anonymous local blog, gives some good background info as well as a taste of some of the passions and personalities involved in this local drama which is fast becoming a national spectacle.

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