Dear Editor,
Jeers to the editorial board of the Gilroy Dispatch for turning down an opportunity to support Proposition 81.
The passage of this proposition might provide funds to build a bigger Gilroy library building. How do you propose that the city will accomplish this? With its own funds? Or probably not at all, according to your comments.
It is the county, not the city, that pays for all library materials and library staff.
Maybe the city should go back to its old Carnegie building, the current Gilroy Historical Museum, and do without staff and library materials, which the city could never afford to fund on the same basis as the country does.
The criticism about pornography being available on library computers which can be used by kids is the argument presented by Cynthia Walker. She declared several years ago that she would not send her children to such a “dangerous” place as the Gilroy library because a young person was assaulted in a library in, was it Massachusetts? That kind of reasoning not to support Proposition 81 is equivalent to your current reasoning not to support the same proposition.
Many of us, residents of both the city and the country (unincorporated Gilroy), would like to have a bigger and better local library building.
If parents are worried about their children looking up pornography on the library’s computers, why don’t they accompany their children to the library to make sure that they use the computers only to look up things on the Internet that the parent(s) approve of? Isn’t that what many parents do at home when their children use their home computer? Why should librarians monitor other people’s children’s computer use in the library?
Librarians are supported by our public taxes and I certainly don’t want to pay for their monitoring children’s use of library computers. Librarians have to answer the public’s research questions, select library materials, give public programs – for children and adults, adolescents, college students, senior citizens – as well as work with library commissions and government employees, among many other things. Nevertheless, despite all this work, our Gilroy librarians and staff do an excellent job.
Jan O’ Hanrahan, Gilroy
