Postmarks

I will be disappointed to see the work of the Libraries for the Future task force go for naught.

Willie and Maurine Kocurek

---

Bleak Future for Libraries

Dear Editor,

I am disappointed. As President of the Friends of the Austin Public Library I, and many others, have spent over two years serving on the mayor's Austin Libraries for the Future task force, which was funded with a grant from the RGK Foundation. We were asked to develop a plan to bring the Austin Public Library into the 21st century as an outstanding example of what a public library should be. Thousands of hours, by the task force, Austin citizens, and the library staff were spent in developing and gathering data from meetings, interviews, surveys, and focus groups to determine what the community wanted from the public library. In spite of a new community vision for the library's future, this year's proposed budget does not include significant increases in library funding. The findings were presented to the city council, to favorable review and unanimous acceptance, in September 2000. (Copies of the report and follow-up reports are available at the library and on their Web site: www.cityofaustin.org/library.) The report identified seven major goals to be met to turn the library into an outstanding example of service to the community. The mayor asked certain members of the task force to continue serving on a follow-up task force to oversee the implementation of the task force goals. Our job was to assist the library staff in developing programs to meet the seven goals. Detailed plans have been developed, by the library staff, to position the library to meet the goals. Some of the recommendations have been adopted; however, the future of the Libraries for the Future recommendations is in doubt. Over the years, funding for popular programs -- such as Walking Books, the Job Information Center, and the Summer Reading Program -- has been eliminated. Staff positions, already limited, are being eliminated in the present budget. The consequences of this action will have serious effect on the library's ability to meet the needs of service to the community or act as a selling point for business relocations, let alone the necessary improvements to the library system.

The Austin Public Library Foundation has been instrumental in obtaining funding from community and businesses to fund specific programs such as the Wired for Youth (Dell) and the AMD grant to purchase science and technology materials. The Friends have provided funding for the summer reading program for several years. More than 10,000 young people are currently enrolled in this program to develop and improve reading skills. In addition we provide money for everything from professional development for staff to travelling puppet shows. This year the Friends will contribute more than $50,000. Even with our assistance the library appears to be going backwards.

By instituting the task force plan the library could become a national example. As it is, we are on the brink of mediocrity. I invite the citizens of Austin to let the City Council and the city manager's office know of your concerns for the future of the Austin Public Library.

Sincerely,

Kenneth P. LaRonde

---

Smart Growth Needs Smart Ideas

Editor:

At the risk of becoming the Amy Babich of urban planning, I feel compelled to comment on Rick Hall's recent remarks regarding Smart Growth ["Postmarks: Austin's War on the Poor," Aug. 3]. Hall states that Austin's Smart Growth planning is "a purge of lower-income Austinites" and amounts to "a War on the Poor." That's interesting. At my neighborhood planning sessions, we have upper middle-class people showing up to complain that Smart Growth will result in an influx of students and lower-income individuals. Rick, do you think you could get together with the rich folks to work this one out? Is Smart Growth going to ruin the neighborhoods by forcing all the poor folks to move out, or is Smart Growth going to ruin the neighborhoods by allowing more poor folks to move in? Inquiring minds would like to know.

I'm tired of people who complain about Smart Growth without offering any alternative solutions. If you're one of these people, perhaps you should sit on the sidelines to help reduce the noise pollution a little. If your solution is the status quo, then feel free to join the other whiners on the sidelines, for when we have a situation -- as we do now -- where AISD is unable to fill teaching jobs because a starting teacher can't afford to live in Austin, the status quo clearly isn't working. Smart Growth consists of nothing more than a few modest changes in the land use code designed to provide a little more flexibility to people trying to provide additional housing in Austin. The effect of Smart Growth on property taxes is a complicated issue which can't be explicated in a 300-word letter to the editor. Suffice it to say that if we don't try and create more housing in central Austin, property taxes will continue to go up anyway. We'll just have a lot more sprawl to deal with, as well.

Patrick Goetz

---

Hiding the Barton Springs Antidote

Editor:

I was amused by homebuilders' attorney Craig Douglas challenging the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to show us "the population numbers" to prove the Barton Springs salamander is in jeopardy of extinction ["Mercury, Cadmium, Arsenic, Grease ...," Aug. 3]. For many years, the homebuilders argued that there was "no evidence" of pollution at Barton Springs, even though the evidence was overwhelming. Now that the evidence is beyond dispute -- a long list of heavy metals, pesticides, and petroleum hydrocarbons found in bottom sediments are regularly exceeding levels known to be toxic to aquatic life -- the homebuilders now argue "show us the bodies."

Mr. Douglas knows it's not possible to count salamanders, living or dead, inside the aquifer. He also knows that whether there are three or 3 million salamanders, all of them live at Barton Springs. The salamander has one of the smallest ranges of any vertebrate species, and its entire range is being polluted. Whether it's one spill or the chronic pollution from too much development, both the salamander and the springs are facing overwhelming and immediate threats to their survival.

His suggestion that the Fish & Wildlife Service is overreaching is also absurd. Please remember that it took two lawsuits by the SOS Alliance and UT biology professor Mark Kirkpatrick to force the listing of the salamander as "endangered" and overcome developer lobbying inside the Clinton White House.

The new data reported by the Service should be a very loud wake-up call for all those Austin leaders, public and private, who count themselves green (and for regular citizens as well). If we don't stop the sprawl in the Barton Springs watershed now, our springs will soon be dead.

Many thanks to Amy Smith and the Chronicle for an excellent report.

Sincerely,

Bill Bunch

Executive Director

SOS Alliance

---

Keep Trees at 24th and Lamar

Dear Editor,

Austin's Department of Transportation is planning to widen Lamar Boulevard, just south of 24th Street, for a left turn lane. They plan to pave over some parkland and cut down some trees on the east side of Lamar, by the Caswell tennis courts.

The City Council has set a public hearing on this proposal for Thursday, Aug. 23, at 6pm, at the LCRA building, just east of the intersection of Enfield Road and Lake Austin Boulevard. I strongly urge people to show up at this hearing and speak against this proposal. It's only a little bit of parkland, just a few more trees. But we need to speak out against the continued paving of public lands and cutting trees to widen roads so that cars can move faster through Austin.

24th Street at Lamar is a major pedestrian entrance to Pease Park. The Department of Transportation has not counted or studied pedestrian activity at this intersection. For a person walking across Lamar at 24th Street, there are already five car lanes to cross.

You might wonder why this is being done. It's being done to make us happy! The Department of Transportation believes that what Austinites want most is a shorter waiting time at traffic lights, even at the cost of paving parkland, cutting down trees, and making it harder to walk to Pease Park.

They're doing this for us. So if you don't want the city to do you any favors by cutting down trees and paving parkland, please go to the hearing on Aug. 23 at 6pm, at LCRA headquarters. I'll see you there.

Yours Truly,

Amy Babich

---

Changing Channels, Not Minds

Editor:

I have just finished reading Michael Ventura's "Of Goddesses and Feckless Thugs" ["Letters @ 3AM," Aug. 3] and although I would love to believe we are witnessing the wane of Christian fundamentalism in this country, I'm afraid it simply is not so.

Mr. Ventura cites "blasphemous" scenes from a recent episode of The West Wing and the miniseries The Mists of Avalon that escaped without conservative outcry as evidence of this trend. To me, the fact that there was no protest over these shows simply says that no one likely to protest was watching them.

Gazillion-chanelled cable services have separated audiences into the most minute demographics possible. We can choose networks that cater to our ethnicity, religion, or political orientation and avoid that which offends us. Conservative Christians likely to take issue with Josiah Bartlet's speech would probably rather take a hot poker in the eye than spend an evening watching the liberal West Wing in the first place.

Jeanine Finn

---

Waste Not Want Not

Dear Editor:

Regarding Mme. Chastenet de Géry's rant about the wastefulness of other restaurants' huge portions in her Starlite restaurant review ["Good Things in Small Packages," July 27]: To a certain extent, I agree, but hasn't she ever heard of a to-go box? I don't ever leave any significant amount of food on my plate, but rather always ask to take it home, where it usually makes an easy second meal. If it's hot outside and I can't leave it in the car or carry it around, I give it to a homeless person, something I also have done in San Francisco and New York. Perhaps asking for a to-go box or tinfoil is considered impolite or uncool, but I think it's immoral to waste food when so many people in our own community are going hungry, and if I were on a date with someone who insisted on leaving half his meal behind, it would be our last. I agree that most restaurant portions tend to be huge, and that it's often difficult to finish all of just one entrée, much less several courses. This is partly because Americans tend to eat just one all-inclusive entree, say, a pasta dish that also contains a lot of meat or vegetables, rather than several separate courses as they do in Europe. But I just see large portions as an opportunity to skip the cooking on two nights, and during summer in Texas, that's a blessing!

Julia Spencer

---

Make Room for the Rail

Editor:

Back when TxDOT was planning to completely rebuild North Central Expressway in Dallas, one option included putting tracks for Dallas Area Rapid Transit's rail system under the new frontage roads. Although DART elected to build more expensive deep bore tunnels rather than wait three extra years for the expressway construction, the idea had merit: If they're going to tear everything up anyway, it isn't much more expensive and no more disruptive to leave room for rail.

Now TxDOT is planning to completely rebuild I-35 in Austin between 51st and downtown (see www.i35austin.com/newsletters/vol6/volume_6.shtml), replacing it with a below-grade roadway identical to North Central in Dallas -- without rails. Does that make any sense? Just how often do we get an opportunity to build a cut-and-cover subway tunnel into downtown with no incremental disruption to traffic, business, or the environment during construction?

Capital Metro taxpayers already own a rail line that intersects I-35 at the north end of TxDOT's proposed reconstruction. It is Cap Metro's "Red Line," only the plan voters turned down last November proposed using North Lamar and Guadalupe to connect it to downtown. That plan would put trains averaging 17 miles per hour on city streets, wouldn't allow vehicles to make left turns, would take private property and eliminate businesses' parking spaces, and would close entire blocks for months at a time during several years of construction. If those trains instead ran alongside Airport Boulevard (after stopping at an elevated station over Lamar), then under the southbound I-35 frontage road to downtown, they could run three times as fast, wouldn't cause or be caught in traffic jams, and wouldn't take private land or parking spaces. To answer the opposition's slogan: costs less, does more.

If TxDOT is going to dig the I-35 ditch anyway, shouldn't they leave room for rails?

Kent Maysel

---

Time Warner's Double Jeopardy

Dear Editor,

"Quality customer service is our number one priority."

My ass.

This is the first quote found on the Time Warner Cable (Austin) Web site. This is the only thing I could not find on Thursday, Aug. 2, when they changed all of our channels. I've endured having to learn new channel numbers many times over the years that Time Warner has had a stranglehold on my television, and have never complained. I've put up and shut up about the whole "packaged" channels ordeal, which usually leaves me without some of the good ones. This time? Well, I'd like to say "it's war," but since Time Warner owns almost everything now, I doubt my one little squeak is gonna hurt them much. On Thursday they arbitrarily took the Independent Film Channel and the Sundance Channel off of the lineup that we've all been paying out the ass for already, and have decided to sell it back to us for $4 extra -- as part of their "movie package" crap. How can a company sell me something -- which I buy -- then take it away from me, only to offer to sell it back to me if I pay more money? Is this legal? Then, of course, they leave me no outlet for my frustrations -- just some poor drone on the other end of the phone telling me there's nothing they can do ... except to sign me up for the package. Doesn't anybody care anymore? Why isn't anyone complaining? This is why corporate takeovers are so bad! When you finally get screwed, and you will get screwed, there's no democracy left to hear your screams. Things are fucked up, America. If you open your eyes and look around -- real hard -- you might realize ... "we're not in Kansas anymore."

Heather Kafka