Over the weekend, the Gordon Administration started releasing some details in the planned trip to Denmark for a library tour by the Community Services Manager and an Administrative Librarian. The NJ article now has some estimates of the cost of the trip for two people and the planned dates of travel. There’s also some estimates of the costs of previous trips. The NJ is still pursuing its FOIA request for this data. Still — it’s all so much bull:
Some council members said they had never been briefed on the project. When they were finally given details last week, the Denmark trip was left out of the presentation. One council member happened to ask about it because he had heard a rumor.
“They all knew the principle behind this, which was to design the best library in the country,” Gordon said of council. “To attack that, it looks like we’re fighting and hurts our ability to attract more partners.”
Got that? There’s a fair bit of daylight between briefing the County Council on a major capital project and understanding its principles. And I’d expect that if everyone knew the principles behind this project that this question of fact-finding trips wouldn’t be such an issue. As seems to be a very destructive habit by Gordon, some folks on County Council get to know about what is planned and others do not. So he continues to be bitten here by his own management style here. Because the people who continue to not be in the loop are the people who continue to make Gordon look like a dyslexic reader of Sun Tzu. Those left out can always provide a perspective to the media that the Gordon Administration is not transparent, so that they are fighting over transparency rather than the project. It’s the blind side of the authoritarian, right?
It doesn’t help that Jea Street takes to the paper to get his victim on:
Councilman Jea Street agreed. He said he views the questions about the travel costs are signs of a hidden agenda of opposition to the library by some of his colleagues.
“It’s clear that there will be a fight until completion,” he said.
Note to Jea — people like libraries and when they can be paid for, they are a fairly easy capital project. No one is fighting the library, they are fighting Gordon’s high school management style (I talk to YOU and I don’t talk to YOU) and they are doing what they should be doing — questioning the circumstances and price tag of how this comes into being. Tom Gordon may be telling Street and Bullock that we spend whatever it takes — they still have to face a County Council who does manage the purse strings. And going as far as Denmark to tour a library isn’t about fact-finding at this point — it is about buying some credibility. When they roll this out, they want to claim that this is state-of-the-art or state-of-the-practice and they’ll want to point to where it is being done in other places as evidence of that. Which pretty much papers over the fact that there isn’t a formal needs assessment that exists to support all of this “fact-finding”.
So here’s a question to the OG Gordon watchers — how does the evolution of the building of the library parallel how the PALs came about?