Yesterday Ashley Walden and I went to Fowler & Fresno. It was Ashley’s first time north of Valencia in California!
We first went to meet John Searcy at Mini-Mobile in Fresno. This is the company we will be renting our portable housing from. John is a very helpful resource for our needs there. We got to see the kind of units that we will be using. The ones they had in and available for us to look at were kind of trashed- just returned and not yet cleaned & repaired. They are much more solid than we had imagined—not raised up like a trailer but they sit directly on the ground.
Concerns:
1. How many generators will we need for our current plan which is for 7- 20’ units and 1- 40’ unit? The same company we plan to use for our porta-loo rental also does this sort of thing—arranging temp power and/or renting generators.
2. Damaging /marring the asphalt that the units will be placed on. We chose the location for the housing units based on the need for level surface, to not be living in the dirt patch and to be least obtrusive to the Obon Festival events (by our best guess) and the neighbors. The levelness is not an issue, according to John Searcy. I’d like to reconsider the idea of arranging our housing on the other side of the property to prevent damage to the cement parking area. Another means of reducing the chance of marring the cement is to use wooden blocks on the bottom edges of the units because the units do have to be dragged to get off and maybe on the delivery truck. I do not want to mar or break the asphalt at the property—the cost and hassle of repairing that is too much to think about it.
3. Availability to meet all we request. These things are rented for indefinite periods, mostly by construction companies. They generally need a lot of clean up before they can be sent out again. John knows our needs and has calendared checking in and planning for availability 45 days in advance and working to track down all that we require. This may include substituting 2- 10’ units for some of the 20’ units.
Ashley and I also spent some time looking into some company management resources—locations of stores, laundromats, etc.
At 6pm we attended the monthly Friends of the Library meeting. Apparently it was the largest turn-out ever for one of these meetings. This is due to the fact that their amazing librarian, Sara Brown, has been laid off and will no longer be working at the Fowler Branch library. Sara does exemplary work for this community, but due to being one of the 6 newest, youngest librarians employed by the county she is on the list of people to be let-go first. Sara has secured work for the county in another department and is on some kind of stand-by to be rehired, depending on how some things shake down with budgets in the next couple months. However it’s unclear if she is rehired as a librarian if she’d be re-assigned to Fowler. There were many people present specifically to commend Sara’s work, show her their appreciation and to let the head of county libraries know that Fowler is not happy about this change. The head of county libraries spoke for a long time (somewhat repetitiously) about the budget situation, how the firing of Sara was out of her control and how difficult things will be for the librarian who has to come and replace Sara.
There were some familiar folks in attendance at this meeting including Arpie Deitz, Clara Bedrosian Bousian and Sandie Monis. Also Council member Rico Aguayo is on the board of the Friends of the Library. And I finally met Britta Hammer, head of the Historical Society. Also present were 2 or 3 other folks from the main office of Fresno County libraries, and another 10 or 12 people.
The Fowler Branch library is unique in that this community, led by the Friends of the Library, collected donations to fund and build this library themselves. The old one was a storefront space on the main street, like a tiny bookstore. When it looked like the county was going to take a long, bureaucratic time to build a much-needed new library the community made it happen on their own, a fact they are very proud of. They did an excellent job, too, in terms of design and meeting the needs of Fowler’s residents. The library serves as a community center in many ways for this small town. And Sara’s work has reinforced that – she manages and devises lots of programs offered for adults and youth at the library, as well as regular outreach to most of Fowler’s schools.
The Fowler Community Hospital Foundation has made significant donations to the library so there was some discussion of what’s happened in the past with regard to that. There is a new donation, too, of $5000 toward the History Room. There was some discussion about how to best utilize these funds.
The meeting also included a summary review of the organizations finances and a report on how many people have been served in the community, particularly in relation to other county numbers. There was a short discussion about how to best manage book sales for fundraising.
Sara had invited me to attend because I’d inquired with her to learn if there was some way that Cornerstone could help with collecting oral histories while we are in residence. I spoke briefly to introduce our project, invite people to our upcoming story circle, and to tell the group what I’d told Sara—that there seems to be a strong need and energy toward collecting personal stories and oral histories of this community and that we as outsiders wouldn’t want to take over such an important task but that we are interested and available to assist with that during our 4 weeks in town.
People seemed interested and excited about our project. Sara and Rico were both immediately talking with us about helping to get the word out. I talked briefly with Rico too, about our need for rehearsal space and he said of course that the elementary school would be perfect. I let him know that the school district had been uninterested when we’d approached them in the past. However I am going to reach out to them again regarding this new, somewhat smaller request for rehearsal space.
Julie, Ashley and I will be returning to Fowler on Thursday of this week and staying through Saturday afternoon. Thursday night we’ll be attending a history event at the library—George Taraoke will be doing a presentation on the history of Japanese people in Fowler and the county. Friday we’ll do some interviews in the day and have a story circle with Buddhist church and non-Buddhist Japanese community members. On Saturday we’ll have an open story circle at the library.
No comments:
Post a Comment