--For every dollar sucked up by a $100 million palace at the Kaiser Center, Measure N gives each branch an average of three cents. One bathroom for 30 years of bonds? An insult! --The point is to send Measure N back to the council. Make the councilmembers do it right!

First let me say that I love libraries, spent a good part of my youth in my neighborhood library and also many happy hours in the history room of the main Oakland library, but there is no way I am voting for Measure N. We have much more immediate needs in my neighborhood than a new library. This summer has been a nightmare of crime in 18Y including car break-ins, 3 house break-ins just on my little block, rampant prostitution and drug dealing not to mention the murder on my street one beautiful June evening. What we really need in Oakland are some more police officers and until we get them I am not voting for anything else, not for schools, libraries, animal shelters or anything else. Public Safety should be our number one concern.

This is a very sad and counterproductive attitude. First, policing and libraries are not in competition for funding. Funding is available and already earmarked to greatly increase the size of the police force, but training time and recruitment issues have made the progress towards this goal painfully slow. Still, the money is already there. Voting against Measure N will not do anything to improve neighborhood safety. In fact, a No Vote on Measure N should be unconscionable for anyone who truly cares about improving public safety. Libraries provide one of the few truly safe and productive avenues to fight the root causes of violence available in this city. They give children from poor and working-class families access to tools that can help them escape the cycle of violence and crime that so tragically pervades many areas of this city. To vote No on Measure N because one is concerned about crime would be tragically misguided. That sort of attitude will quickly make the problems worse, not better.

I'm with Judith- I love libraries, I'm a writer, and I'm a preservationist., but I am voting no on Measure N. To put the main library into the Kaiser Auditorium is to ram a square peg into a round hole. According to the sample ballot, which I just perused, the cost of the new main library is estimated at $98 million. I want someone to explain to me how ONE BUILDING can cost 98 MILLION DOLLARS! The ballot also says it will be finished at 110,000 sq. ft., with 40,000 sq.ft. to be finished later. $98,000,000 divided by 150,000 equals a bit over $653 a square foot. In a random search of the internet, the highest cost I could find for commercial construction was $151 sq. ft. Obviously that is for new construction, but even tripling that figure to allow for the complexities of adaptive reuse only gets up to $453 s.f., which would come out at $67.9 million for 150,000 s.f. New construction (without land acquisition costs, but perhaps the Port would offer the City the same bargain basement price on a piece of land that they offered Signature Properties for Oak to Ninth) would be about $34 million. One thing that has not been mentioned in all of this is how these assessments hit new homeowners the hardest. It's easy for owners with pre-Prop 13 assessments to be in favor of these taxes- on a house assessed at $75,000, the tax from this measure, should it pass, will be less than $40, while on a house bought recently for $500,000, it will be $198. Add to that the double-whammy that while the assessed value of a home can only go up 2% per year, on a $75,000 assessment that equals $1500, while on the $500,000 house it equals $10,000. So in year 2, the owner of the pre-Prop 13 home is still paying under $40 for this measure, while the other owner is paying $201. Thus is the tax burden shifted to newer homeowners. I am sure my next door neighbor, an Oakland schoolteacher who is working three jobs to pay for her house, cannot really afford another $200 or so on her property taxes, no matter how much she may believe in libraries. I note the ballot arguments for Measure N were signed by writers Ishmael Reed and Maxine Hong Kingston- writers who both have earned more money from their books than Judith or myself. But the largest contributors to the Yes on N campaign include Ed de Silva (the man who brought us the Raiders deal and the Leona Quarry project), David Duong (owner of California Waste Solutions), the onwer of a large security firm that specializes in providing security for gov.t buildings, AND the architecture firm that did the feasibility study for moving the library and is likely to get the contract for building it. Why should the neighborhood libraries be satisfied with the crumbs provided to them by this measure when the bulk of this bond goes to build a trophy library in a building that was never meant for it? I'm voting no!

Ms Powell does not understand what she is reading. Not surprising, as few people not in the construction industry do. She is talking apples and oranges. Construction cost and project costs are two different things. The cost of the Main Library is as listed. The CONSTRUCTION COSTS are as listed $315-350/SF. Construction cost is the cost to BUILD a building. Project costs include many more things - that's the $98million. When you see a construction cost in the paper , it means just that, and in order to compare apples and apples, those are the numbers you have to use. For example,San Francisco Public Library is building several new branches - one is Ingleside Branch; new construction of 6100sf with Project cost of $6,245,000 that's 1024.sf Project Cost. Construction costs are estimated at $2,729,230 - that's $447/sf Construction Cost. You can look at the cost of building libraries on the State Library's web site at http://www.olc.library.ca.gov/ MaryLiz

I am in favor of the goals of N, but from what I understand the actual cost to taxpayers is based on their property tax. If this is accurate, it is completely unfair and continues to perpetuate the unfair legacy of Prop 13. So, for example, the couple across the street from me, who has lived in their house for 30 years, will pay ~5-10x less than I would for the bonds issued. It should be based on square footage, parcel size or a flat amount per household.

Thanks to Genni Katz for reading and responding to my letter to the GUARDIAN, and to assigning me a new nickname, for which I have returned the favor. (I gave her an “i” though because that’s cuter.) I wish to answer some of what she had to say.

First, it will be sad if some of the much-needed work on branch libraries doesn’t get done because we didn’t vote in Measure N. However, we are not the ones that tried to sneak in an extra $100 million dollars of work ($300-$500 per family per year) behind the rubric “help for our libraries.” If the library had just focused on the work on the branches, and extending the hours, neither I nor probably another soul in Oakland would hesitate. This is equivalent to forcing me to adopt three children because I’m trying to take in one.

If the Library Director is so worried about the branches, I wonder why the Oakland Public Library has spent money on a fancy new, little-used “teen section” downtown when some of the branches needed toilets???

The Kaiser Auditorium is shuttered because it wasn’t being used well. It wasn’t being used well because for at least five years, the only “marketing” that had been done for it was an ad in a bridal magazine. There was no marketing director and nobody trying to make it happen. What other large city with a beautiful performing arts center would consider such behavior?! Also, the backstage crew had been allowed to charge exorbitant fees—$35 an hour per man—and would not allow people to bring in their own staff to even move chairs and tables, even one foot. Also, the Black dance companies at the Alice Arts Center had been given special rates, although they already have free space to work in every day, and the extra money had not been reimbursed to the Kaiser budget. In my opinion, this situation was allowed to continue specifically to make the Kaiser available for library use. It was a typical maneuver of the current administration, obviously done with Ms. Martinez’s agreement.

The examples of possible Kaiser uses I gave in my earlier letter were intended to suggest “whatever use.” If Genni doesn’t like dogs or ponies or old cars or choirs or mariachi or taiko drumming or theatre or ballet or opera, as I suggested, perhaps she will suggest something she does like. She sounds a bit picky to me, frankly.

I guess Genni doesn’t go to the Main Library often, or she doesn’t know where the Kaiser is, because they are about three blocks apart, and all of the same transportation/parking availability applies to either one. The parking for the Kaiser, by the way, is already in great demand during the day, for Laney students, Museum attendees and other nearby uses. Anyone afraid to go to the current Main would be equally afraid to go to the Kaiser, which in fact has a large contingent of homeless living in the park and under the highway next to it.

I suppose we do need an enlarged Main, but before we do that, how about increasing the hours of operation at all the branches, fixing the much-needed repairs, and opening the new local libraries. Maybe if the City Council gave up their travels to China and so forth we could do it with the General Fund. Maybe if we weren’t giving a deal to a developer for Oak to Ninth and a deal to the developer of the Forest City Project we could do it. Maybe…well, you get the point.

Most people, like Genni, don’t go to the Main too often. Many Oaklanders don’t have the extra $3 and the extra hour to get downtown on the bus. What they need is the ability to get in and out quickly for a book, time on the computer, or a movie. They need a safe place to read in their own neighborhood. They need homework help from a friendly librarian. They need encouragement to go to a nearby place and learn to read. We Oaklanders came out in force on a moment’s notice five years ago, to save every branch. We back them, as much as we possibly can.

Perhaps MaryLiz doesn't know me, or she would know that I AM in the construction industry (albeit residential) and do not need her "instruction." But taking her figure of $315 s.f. as construction costs, that still means the city will be spending $337 s.f. essentially on furnishings- are we getting gold-plated shelving? I would also like to point out that none of these improvements seems to be about BOOKS- instead all the talk is of wi-fi and computers and teen centers and meeting rooms. These are all fine things, I guess, but let me throw out another figure here: even figured at approximately twice the retail price of a computer (which is about $600), because the city would get screwed on the deal as they always do (remember the very expensive and non-functional Oracle payroll system?), $98 million would buy 98,000 computers, enough to give one to every Oakland household who wanted one. And unlike the computer at the library, people would then be able to use the internet to look things up and post comments on websites even very late at night when the library isn't open, as I am doing now.