Library, Sacred Cow Of Ukiah

If any inattentive adult has any lingering doubt about the value of Ukiah’s library, some fog-clearing clarity is on its way.

Our library, subsidized by everyone, gets additional largesse from dim-witted feel-good patsies who keep dumping more money down its bottomless drain from a special tax giving those who run it even more money to waste.

Which brings us to a big special May 23 event to promote a promotion that needs no promoting: A movie about bicycle lanes and sundry fringe alternatives to streets, cars and sensible transportation.

A movie on the need for bike lanes in 2024. Jeez. Like it’s 1975 and no one knows about bike lanes and safety and helmets and yellow lycra pants to make your fanny look fabulous.

What next? “Library to Host Film on Recycling Benefits”? After that, “The Importance of Good Nutrition,” and “When Out at Night, Wear White!”

But what else can the library do?

Here’s a suggestion: Shut the doors, turn off the lights, make the bookmobile a food truck. Done. Quick, easy, cheap. If the Ukiah library weren’t useless why would it be trying to lure in customers with fingerpainting classes?

Technology changes things. There is a reason there are no more anvil factories in Mendocino County, and there are reasons there are no video rental stores. Check the Yellow Pages for TV repair shops.

How many telephone booth installation workers have lost their jobs in the last 30 years? Try buying a CB radio. Go get the new Taylor Swift album at the record store. Ask for a spare tire in your 2024 Chevy Impala.

Technology: love it, hate it, avoid it when you can, is forever disrupting everything society grows comfortable with. Newspapers have disappeared all across the land, and not because they ran out of reporters.

Is there some reason libraries should stand immune to these forces? Everyone knows there are more places to read than ever before, and on the list of reading outlets libraries rank very low.

Information? A library is the last place you’d go to find out anything, unless you didn’t have a computer or cell phone, which means you’re in jail or dead. Even people my age know about Google, but ask a 40-year old to explain the Dewey Decimal System or the card catalogue.

So, inevitably, we have Ukiah library employees screening free movies about the joys and necessities of bike lanes. Be realistic: If library staff were to hand out $10 bills, free snacks and lemonade to all who came to see the movie, one quart of lemonade would be sufficient. Two or three eight-ounce glasses. Two or three chairs.

Fun Fact: The movie makes a point of scolding the world (or at least those of us not riding a bicycle at the moment) about the dreadful increase in bike fatalities over the years. Then, and with no hint of irony, the filmmakers and their beanie-brained followers insist the future demands more bicyclists and more bike lanes.

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‘FIRST, TEAR DOWN OLD STUFF’

For an example of city leaders at the peak of incompetence, consider the sad, sordid saga of the tin shed building at Perkins and Main Street, recent home of the Dragon’s Lair.

Some bank wanted a spot on East Perkins, so the city bullied the Dragon’s Lair out of its longtime, popular shop. The city sidestepped its own guidelines on historic properties, told lies about the building’s past, got the building condemned, then toasted themselves with crystal champagne flutes for a job well done.

Then the bank backed out of the deal that never was, and Ukiah gets left with yet another (in a long list) of old, historic, valuable properties standing empty. Good work. Someone at city hall just got a promotion and an “Employee of the Month” award.

Meantime, the best and only serious proposal to get the Palace Hotel off its collapsed foundation and rebuilt was developed over the past year. A woman with 24 carat credentials in resurrecting similar California hotels came up with the money and the plans.

Did the city step in to help the first offer in 40 years to save the Palace a reality? No, the city did not. The city didn’t offer to run interference to block the usual gaggle of dreaming whiners with no money. Nor did the city agree to make the building process as smooth and easy as it did to pave the way for the streetscape.

Instead it allowed yet another half-baked developer make a last-ditch pitch to knit together a hazy scheme involving Indian tribes and federal grants to generate free cash for his imaginary project. Same guy is many slow years into doing whatever he’s doing to fix the old Satellite Motel on South State across from the old BofA building (also empty for years).