Resident responds to ‘taxpayers’ letter
To the editor:
Maybe I’m dense, but my reading of the letter from the “FMB Concerned Taxpayers” looks like more same old, same old. The point of this letter? They claim that they paid an attorney a lot of money to scrutinize everything concerned with our library with a magnifying glass (including, probably, how many cents each roll of toilet paper costs) and the attorney could find nothing wrong. Their letter admits that the Library followed all the rules and notified the public by the book about the expansion plan, then goes on to say that the Library Board of Directors “operated well under the town’s radar?” How? Were they supposed to rent a plane and fly a banner over the Gulf? No argument that I can see is made that anything was done incorrectly (but a kind of childish whine of “but this isn’t fair” permeates these insinuations nonetheless).
The sentence “while at this time we can’t claim that Library Board of Directors or its management has violated the law, we can say that they have been very close to the edge of its spirit and intent” sounds to me like a lot of hot air, puffed up in the fervent hope that these people might still find something they pray for, like the stuff of lawsuits and injunctions. Guess what? The above sentence translates to, we couldn’t find anything wrong. Remember the old commercial, “Where’s the beef?”
A suspicious person might get the idea that the old poison-pen tactics we saw ad nauseum months ago either hadn’t worked or had actively backfired, so a more businesslike approach is being tried now.
As far as the Kindle” is concerned, does this group intend to supplant Dr. Hommerding and the Board of Directors and issue edicts on just how the library is to be run? God forbid. Personally, I like the way it’s being run now just fine, and I really don’t want to find Taxpayers busily putting themselves in charge of the library.
Enough, already. If you can’t put up, shut up/. The library played by the rules and deserves its expansion. It is already an excellent library and deserves to be even better. Estero Island has a long history (going back to the days when most people fished for a living and really didn’t have much spare cash) of consistent striving for the best library it could manage, for the good of everyone involved, especially the kids on the island.
Guess what? There are plenty of kids studying and learning at the library. I’ve seen them there. This library is the font of culture and learning on the Beach; it is the hub for everything positive. After all the steaminess we’ve been exposed to on the Beach for the past couple of years, capped by our recent elections (and calls for investigation into what really sounds like real wrongdoing and real malfeasance with taxpayer’s money), I can barely believe that our library, of all things, is being held up to us as (supposedly) a symbol of all that is wrong and a lightning rod for some sort of righteous indignation.
As they say at weddings, speak up now or forever hold your peace. If nothing better than the Concerned Taxpayers’ vague utterances can be spoken, let’s get married to our new library and cut the nonsense out.
Bonnie McLaughlin
Fort Myers Beach