This week’s unnecessary controversy is over a planned trip to Denmark (!) by Community Services Manager, Sophia Hanson, and an unnamed other county employee to inspect a library that apparently they think is a model for what they want to do with the planned library across the street (sort of) from Chris Bullock’s church on Rt 9. County Council did not know of this trip until Councilman George Smiley asked about it after a presentation on this library this week. It isn’t clear that any one knows much more about this trip, but Adam Taylor of the NJ asked for more detail and was pretty much told that the County won’t release more information on this because the County Executive thinks that the NJ is just going to do a hit piece:
County spokesman Tony Prado said Friday that Gordon administration officials would not talk about the trip. They wouldn’t say who was going, when the trip is scheduled to take place, how much it will cost, whose idea it was, or why it is necessary to visit a library in Denmark.
“The executive is concerned this is going to be a negative story and he doesn’t want to comment,” Prado said. “This has been a project that is near and dear to his heart, and the executive feels like this is going to be a hit piece, so he would just rather not comment.”
Prado said The News Journal would have to file a Freedom of Information Act request to get any information about the project.
Got that? The NCCo Executive has decided that he can’t manage better transparency about one piece of his government because he is scared of what the NJ will say about it. Which pretty much says to me that they already know that this is a boondoggle and there is no way to hide that from Adam Taylor. It isn’t as though American libraries have not been furiously innovating to meet evolving needs of their communities (needs pretty well detailed by the Pew people just up the road), and don’t provide a great many examples of libraries recast to serve the kinds of communities the Rt. 9 library is meant to serve. But this isn’t about whether the Americans or the Danes do it better — it is about cost effective research and spending scarce funds on the building rather than on the research. This is also about the lack of transparency from the Gordon administration (given an able assist here from both Jea Street and Chris Bullock) and blaming the News Journal for that lack of transparency. Seriously, if you don’t want the NJ to do a hit piece then don’t give them these kinds of boondoggles to report on. Otherwise, the rest of us just know that Tom Gordon is pretty clear that this bit of research isn’t going to pass the public opinion smell test.