Polygon, the Dancing Bear

Occasional notes on politics, history, technology, architecture,
and the life of a county clerk

2002:
May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December

2003:
January / February / March
April / May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December

2004:
January / February / March
April / May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December

2005:
January / February / March
April / May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December

2006:
January / February / March
April / May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December

2007:
January / February / March
April / May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December

2008:
January / February / March
April / May

Current entries

Thursday, April 21, 2005, 7:58 pm

From a webmaster's inbox. Those of you who don't own web sites probably don't get spam like this:

Farm equipment?


Hi,

I took a look at your site a couple of hours ago...
and I want to tell you that I'd really love to trade links with you. I
think
your site has some really good stuff related to my site's topic of farm
equipment
and would be a great resource for my visitors as it deals with some great
aspects of farm equipment that I'd like to give my visitors more
information
about.

In fact, I went ahead and added your site to my Farm Equipment HQ Resource
Directory at...

Marble?


Hi,

I took a look at your site a couple of hours ago...
and I want to tell you that I'd really love to trade links with you. I
think
your site has some really good stuff related to my site's topic of marble
and would be a great resource for my visitors as it deals with some great
aspects of marble that I'd like to give my visitors more information
about.

In fact, I went ahead and added your site to my Marble HQ Resource
Directory at...

Fire fighters?


Hi,

I took a look at your site a couple of hours ago...
and I want to tell you that I'd really love to trade links with you. I
think
your site has some really good stuff related to my site's topic of fire
fighters
and would be a great resource for my visitors as it deals with some great
aspects of fire fighters that I'd like to give my visitors more
information
about.

In fact, I went ahead and added your site to my Fire Fighters HQ Resource
Directory at...

And thousands more, but you get the idea.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum — Comments

Wednesday, April 20, 2005, 10:08 am

Letter to David Harris: Fugitives and the county jail.

Professor David A. Harris
College of Law
University of Toledo
Toledo, OH 43606-3390

Dear Professor Harris:

I stopped in Toledo on the way to Cincinnati last weekend, and picked up a copy of last Friday's edition of the Toledo Blade.

One front page story, titled "Dragnet snares 10,000 fugitives," quoted you as follows:

"The dirty little secret is that there usually is not enough effort and manpower put into apprehension of fugitives," said David Harris, a law professor at the University of Toledo who studies criminal justice issues. .Most fugitives are aware of this, and it makes the system a joke ... It's never been a top priority."

I'm not sure if you were quoted accurately, but if so, I'm startled that you don't seem to be aware of the reason why outstanding warrants are not a priority: there is no place to put the people who are arrested.

Here in Washtenaw County, Michigan, the shortage of jail and prison space is so severe that the kind of roundup of fugitives described in the story would be inconceivable. Our sheriff is forced regularly to release many inmates early to relieve the pressure on the facility. Moreover, sentencing alternatives to jail are meaningless without any effective sanction: defendants know to choose jail time (from which they will be quickly released) rather than treatment they may badly need.

Last February 22, we went to the voters to ask a small tax increase to fund additional space at the jail. Despite practically unanimous support from local officials, the judiciary, and the newspaper (one headline: "Criminals Love Overcrowded Jail"), the proposal was rejected by a margin of 62% to 38%.

But the county does not have the option to decline to provide an adequate jail. Indeed, state officials are redefinining the parameters of the state prison system to force thousands of inmates into local jails, tremendously increasing the pressure on our cells. Hence, we are preparing to make deep cuts in other county services in order to fund the jail expansion. In particular, a great many sheriff's deputies are likely to be dismissed; the county may even cease to provide any police services — by far the largest discretionary item in our budget.

We're very disappointed by the decision of the voters, but the questions raised by our critics are valid ones. We as a state and as a society have spent billions on jail and prison construction in the last two decades. The incarcerated population has risen to levels never before known, either in absolute terms or per capita, and continues to grow explosively. Yet this rapid growth does not seem to be driven by crime rates. Indeed, yesterday's front-page headline in the Ann Arbor News, summarizing 2004 statistics, was "Crime in city falls sharply".

My own explanation is that crime, at least as measured in homicide death rates, roughly tripled between 1960 and 1975, fluctuated within a narrow range from then until the 1990s, and then declined. But the shock of that enormous increase in 1960-75 left a permanent mark, with new laws and ballot initiatives requiring much greater imprisonment per offender. Ultimately, the culture of the criminal justice system changed permanently in the direction of much greater incarceration. It is hard to conceive of any path back to the level of sentencing per crime that was typical in the U.S. in the 1950s, or in the rest of the world today. No one would dare propose a reduction in sentences across the board.

But all this has a cost which is very palpable at the local level. Many of the services people are accustomed to receiving from state and local governments are being sacrificed to pay for the ongoing expansion and operation of prisons and jails. And some of these cuts feed the problem: our state mental health system was gutted in the 1990s, and now at least 25% of our jail inmates have documented mental illness.

I'm curious as to where you think we could come up with "enough" effort and manpower to pursue fugitives, when the only solution to the shortage of jail cells to hold those fugitives appears to be severe cutbacks in police personnel to apprehend them.

Sincerely,

Lawrence Kestenbaum
County Clerk-Register

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum — Comments

Monday, April 18, 2005, 7:19 pm

From the Clerk-Register

Monday, April 18:

A friend of mine who grew up in Duluth, Minnesota, once described to me the impact of taking a southward trip with her high school band in April. It was like seeing spring in fast motion: going from bleak scenes of dirty snow to flowering tulips and leafy trees in a matter of a few hours on a school bus. The return trip re-ran those same scenes in reverse, like going back in time from May to February.

My weekend wasn't as dramatic as that — I returned last night from three days in northern Kentucky — but certainly that area is farther along in the spring process than we are. And I did get the disorienting sense of coming back to a somewhat earlier time of year.

It's commonplace now to equate time and distance. All of us have heard places being located by the time it takes to get there — "It's an hour north of Lansing," say. And the distance to stars is measured in light-years, the distance you'd travel in a year at the speed of light.

American county government was conceived precisely in these terms of time and distance. The concept was that almost everybody could get from their home to the county seat within a day, and perhaps even return home that same day, and the geographic boundaries were designed accordingly. A person accustomed to getting places on foot could arise at dawn in Manchester [i.e., in the farthest corner of Washtenaw County], walk to the county courthouse in Ann Arbor, and transact business there before it closed. In the 1820s, when our county boundaries were planned, this was indeed a relevant consideration. This was the way that each state put its courts and recordkeeping functions within easy reach of its citizens.

Many things have changed since those days, especially the speed of transportation and communication. Nonetheless, our accessibility and service to our constituents and customers continues to be our most solemn obligation.

Let's have a great week!

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum.

Thursday, April 14, 2005, 7:25 pm

From the Clerk-Register. More letters to my staff.

Wednesday, February 23:

Good afternoon!

We had a smooth, almost trouble-free election yesterday. Congratulations and abundant thanks are due to the elections staff, to our township and city clerks and their staffs, and to the hundreds of election workers.

Of course, I'm very disappointed in the election result. The downside of being the least visible level of government is the difficulty of establishing and implementing a community consensus for any kind of project or action. Most voters have little contact with the justice system. And apparently thousands are still angry at the county's decision, four years ago, to require townships to pay part of the cost of police services.

The loss sets the stage for some very difficult budget decisions for the county.

As a member of the Criminal Justice Collaborative Council, I am sure I will not be alone in striving to find a way to meet the urgent needs of the criminal justice system with the least possible impact on other county services.

Our vital records office deals with the deaths of individuals on a day to day basis, but recently it seems that death has struck down a number of people who have been part of the scene in county government and the court system.

Former assistant prosecutor Lynwood Noah and local attorney Jack Garris are two who will be missed, though I did not know them well personally.

I also recently attended the funeral, in Mason, of Frank Guerriero, once my colleague on the Ingham County Board of Commissioners. He owned an insurance agency and many businesses, including a bowling alley, yet found time for many service groups and every community project. He never hesitated to speak his mind (at length), to ask difficult questions, to force us to think about what we were doing. He was a royal pain — but he was also highly admired and respected.

Frank was 85 and had suffered from Alzheimer's in recent years.

May their memory be for a blessing.

Monday, February 28:

The process for creation of the 2006-07 county budget is now under way. Our office has been grouped with the Equalization department and the County Treasurer's office as one "community of interest" for budget purposes. We are preparing a joint presentation for the Board of Commissioners and will be working together on budget issues.

Chief deputy Clerk-Register Jim Dries is working with chief deputies from the other two offices to shape our presentation and strategy.

One aspect of this year's budget process, for every county department, is to identify and work with constituency groups whose interests are most directly affected by the work of the office or department. Those groups may have valuable ideas, and presumably are in a position to know about and articulate an agency's strengths and unmet needs.

Our Deeds office has been holding meetings with the title companies for some time, and our Elections office works closely with all the township and city clerks. We would like to broaden our outreach to other groups of customers, to organize meetings with their leadership, to hear their concerns and receive their advice. And each such line of communication that we open and maintain will strengthen our case during the coming budget discussions.

Among those suggested so far: funeral directors, clergy, physicians, realtors, genealogists, news media, judges, and attorneys.

If you have any thoughts about how best to engage (or not?) the leadership of these various groups, or perhaps others we should be thinking about, please pass those ideas along to Jim Dries or myself.

Of course, in addition to identifiable groups whose job it is to interact with us on a regular basis, we see almost every citizen in our offices at some time or other. It's not possible to bring the public at large into the budget process, but it is our job to serve them well, and to treat every customer with courtesy and respect - whether or not they fit into an interest group.

I deeply and personally appreciate the work that each and every one of you does to meet those goals.

Monday, March 21:

The buildings left by the ancient Greeks and Romans serve as architectural models for every generation since then. In their attention to detail and proportion, they give us what is called the classical language of architecture, a set of rules as detailed a cookbook for making a building as a computer programming language is for making software.

Over the last few centuries, classical architecture has come to be seen as symbolic of democracy and law, so it was a natural choice for many public buildings until Modern architecture displaced it in the 1950s. Moreover, majestic classical buildings are thought to inspire — or perhaps intimidate — visitors into their best behavior.

One of my first assignments in graduate school was to select a classical style building, draw a picture of one representative corner of it, from top to bottom, and "label ALL the parts." Every one of those moldings and surfaces and angles and indentations in stone has a particular name. Those three basic types of columns (Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian) are only the beginning.

Classical style buildings can be as grand as Angell Hall on State Street, with its huge columns, or as relatively humble as our own county administration building (former post office) at 220 North Main. For the assignment, I selected the New York Public Library, at the corner of 42nd Street and 5th Avenue in Manhattan, New York City. It was an ambitious choice, because the Library is a fully elaborated, absolutely top-of-the-line classical building, and its entabulatures are enormously complex. With all the parts labeled, my drawing was covered in fine print. But that didn't mean the building was fussy or overdone. If the details are like instruments in an orchestra, the classical language is the music.

I remembered that assignment last week, when I visited the National Archives in Washington DC, a building which strongly reminded me of the New York Public Library.

On a larger scale, the staff of the National Archives has the same job that we do in this office: that of storing and indexing and protecting and making available a whole lot of public records. Undoubtedly they deal with a lot of the same problems that we have, from rude visitors to budget cuts to water leaks in the basement. And they, too, are urged through mission statements and memos and emails to treat all customers with courtesy and respect.

Here in the Washtenaw County clerk-register's office, we don't have Corinthian columns or twenty foot ceilings to impress our visitors with the majesty of law. We don't have world-famous historical documents on the premises. But in recording documents and serving customers, we can choose to work together as harmoniously as the instruments in an orchestra, or the details of classical architecture — an accomplishment which can be just as impressive.

A personal announcement. Yesterday, I completed the first complete update since September 2003 of my personal web site, PoliticalGraveyard.com. The site has listings and brief biographical information for U.S. political figures, living and dead, from Colonial times to the present.

Thursday, March 29:

Yesterday morning, my wife mentioned an old saying, but her version sounded wrong to me.

No, I insisted, it actually goes like this:

Libraries can get you through times of no money
better than money can get you through times of no libraries.

I saw it many years ago in the Whole Earth Catalog. And that slogan has been picked up and used in campaigns for libraries ever since.

But when I did a Google web search, I found just how adaptable this phrase has been. There were thousands of search results.

I found some which seemed paraphrases of the library saying:

Books can get you through times of no money
better than money can get you through times of no books.

Knowledge will get you through times of no money
better than money will get you through times of no knowledge.
(attributed on that page to Lewis Carroll)

There were some which seemed pretty universal — I think we could all agree on these:

Hope will get you through times of no money
better than money will get you through times of no hope. (pdf)

Laughter will get you through times of no money
better than money will get you through times of no laughter.

Self-control will get you through times of no money
better than money will get you through times of no self-control.

Love will get you through times of no money
better than money will get you through times of no love.

Music will get you through times of no money
better than money will get you through times of no music.

And then there were a whole lot of others — here are just a few (leaving aside many drug references):

Whistles will get you through times of no money
better than money will get you through times of no whistles.

Bikes get you through times of no money
better than money gets you through times of no bikes.

Bull Terriers will get you through times of no money, better than money will get you through times of no Bull Terriers.

Skiing gets you through times of no money
better than money gets you through times of no skiing.

Trucks will get you through times of no money
better than money will get you through times of no trucks.

Guns will get you through times of no money
better than money will get you through times of no guns.

Nutmeg will get you through times of no money
better than money will get you through times of no nutmeg.

Fiddlin' will get you through times of no money
better than money will get you through times of no fiddlin'.

A laptop computer will get you through times of no money
better than money will get you through time of no laptop computer.

Environment will get you through times of no money
better than money will get you through times of no environment.

Games will get you through times of no money
better than money will get you through times of no games.

Banjo will get you through times of no money
better than money will get you through times of no banjo.

But somebody did see the humor in this:

Money will get you through times of no money
better than no money will get you through times of no money.

That's something we will surely be mindful of during the impending budget negotiations.

Have a great week!

(Web update. Of course I now know this saying (as to "dope") was popularized by the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, but that wasn't something to discuss in an official Washtenaw County communication.)

Monday, April 11:

Elections. Our preparations continue for the Tuesday, May 3 school elections. School board members will be chosen in every Washtenaw County school district except South Lyon. This will be the first school election under the new election consolidation law. In most areas, voters will be casting their ballots at their regular city or township precinct locations instead of the old school district precincts.

Long meetings and negotiations, led by our elections director, Derrick Jackson, have settled the polling locations and assigned responsibility for each of the myriad tasks of holding an election. We owe a lot to our township and city clerks for working with us on these critical tasks.

Meanwhile, we have been able to replace all of the voting equipment countywide under a Help America Vote Act (HAVA) grant. Some areas will be able to use the new equipment in the May election.

This morning (Monday) at 9:00 am, at Salem Township Hall, we will be training municipal clerks to conduct the Public Accuracy Test of the tabulating equipment.

I think holding school elections on a Tuesday in early May is likely to draw more participation than the traditional Monday in mid-June. However, several of the school districts don't have contested races this year, so it will take some time for the difference, if any, to be apparent.

Directory. Our biennial county directory will soon be published in an initial run of 10,000 copies. We are still accepting advertisements for the directory — the ads pay for the printing cost. The price this year is $500 for a full page ad, $250 for a half page ad. The directory is very popular around the county, and thousands hold on to it for reference. If you know of business which would like to take out an ad in the directory, please have them call our office at 734-222-6730 as soon as possible.

ATM. After years of determined effort by Karen Edman, it looks like Court Services will soon have an automatic teller machine in the County Courthouse first floor hallway. The main purpose will be to pay our jurors in cash rather than with paper checks (a win for everyone involved). However, the machine will also be available for anyone to use as a cash machine, like any bank ATM. The fee for withdrawals has not been set, but it may be the same or a little less than the $2 charged by commercial ATMs in our vicinity.

Computer Stress. Some of our offices have been plagued by computer and network problems recently. In particular, the Vital Records office had a tough week but, as Bonnie Smith wrote, "because we all worked together to help each other we got through it with laughter and fun."

That reminds me of the old parable about someone who was permitted to visit Heaven and Hell. Of course, he found that the people in Hell were unhappy, and that the people in Heaven were happy. But, strangely enough, Heaven and Hell had exactly the same facilities and amenities. The only difference was the way the inhabitants treated one another.

It's up to each of us to decide whether our workplace will be heavenly or hellish.

Let's have a great week!

Also on April 11:

Today, April 11, marks my one hundredth day in office as Clerk-Register.

Looking back on these 100 days, I am struck once again by how helpful, friendly, and welcoming everyone in the office has been.

Your hard and careful work, your dedication to courteous and respectful customer service, are appreciated and highly regarded in the various communities we serve. I hear this all the time from constituents.

We have overcome some challenges in this brief time so far, and I'm sure we will be confronted with many others in the years ahead, as we strive to uphold and improve on the high standards we have set for ourselves.

For all of this, I am very, very grateful to each of you. Thank you.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum — Comments

2002:
May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December

2003:
January / February / March
April / May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December