A near capacity crowd in the Dearborn Council chambers got a surprise tonight — Mayor John B. O’Reilly said all pools would remain open this year.

Many in attendance were expecting just the opposite.

O’Reilly discussed the proposal to close the six pools with the council ahead of the meeting. It appears each council member agreed it wasn’t the right thing to do, at least not this year. While the pools will remain open this year, O’Reilly cautioned those in attendance that he was not promising anything in the future because the funding problem for the pools wasn’t going to go away.

Dearborn Councilman George Darany says the city will have to find new ways to raise additional money down the road to properly maintain the city’s eight public pools. One source of revenue is through the purchase of pool tags. Residents fighting to save their pools can help by purchasing more pool tags and getting their neighbors to do the same. 

Another option to raise funding for the pools was to try and sell ad space along the fencing that rings each pool as well as selling ad space in the bottom of the pool. Darany says whatever the idea, “let’s explore all of the ideas until we exhaust them. We really need to come up with solutions.”

A lot of credit for changing the minds of the mayor and council go to 15-year-old Danielle Misovich and her sister Elizabeth who launched a Facebook group — Save Dearborn’s Small Pools — to let other pool supporters know what the city was proposing. Today the group is nearly 3,400 strong.

Thanks to their efforts, Dearborn residents will all be able to swim for another day.

Should Library Consider a Property Tax Levy for Direct Funding?

With our economy still sputtering and unemployment still rising, libraries are noticing a surge in business. This is good news for Dearborn libraries but higher usage doesn’t guarantee protection from the city’s budget cutting axe.

One of the current proposals being discussed would see the elimination of seven full-time library positions, leaving each of the city’s three branch libraries with just one full-time librarian and a host of part-time workers.

The good news is that the branch libraries would at least remain open, albeit with the same current short business hours — but at least open — under this proposal.  The collection of the Dearborn library system contains 297,070 volumes and circulates about 954,785 items per year, according to lib-web-cats.

This brings us to another idea on the best ways to keep our library system intact.

Other communities have floated library millages for the sole purpose of having proper funding for what is one of the single most important items for a city and its residents. Nearby communities in metro Detroit operate their libraries this way and it appears to be an effective way to ensure that libraries don’t end up with table scraps when it comes city budget time, which likely could happen to our libraries here in Dearborn when the budget slashing is done.

But millages can be double-edged sword as one can never predict how a community will vote, particularly in today’s economy. That said Jennifer Brash, a staff writer at the entertainment blog thecounterproject, raises some interesting points, comparing how West Bloomfield Township was able to levy a property tax for direct funding of its library services and it has never looked back. You can read that history HERE.

Could something like that work in Dearborn? Hard to say but the idea is an intriguing one.