American Fork Citizen | 1990-04-25 | Page 2

Comment Citizen - Wednesday, April 25, 1990 - Page 2 Community suffers when system is circumvented Recent events in Lehi City provide some insight into our system of government and what happens when that system is circumvented, for whatever reason. Lehi is in the middle of a power struggle between its Mayor, Guy Cash, and the members of the city council. At the heart of the issue is the future home of Lehi's city offices. Plans have been in the making for a few years to build a new city administration building for offices for the city employees who now work in the basement of a remodeled LDS ward house. It would be constructed in conjunction with a new library and senior citizens center and a new public safety building -- both of which have already been constructed. The police have just moved into their new offices. The bid for the new administration building came in over the estimates provided by the architect. Nevertheless, the city council coun-cil voted to award the bid and build the new building -- completing complet-ing a block of city buildings. Across the street from the new buildings lies the Lehi Memorial Memo-rial Building, a unique city structure and the first building completed in the United States which honored World War I veterans. Over the years, the building has served many purposes. It was at one time the city administration building, until the city offices moved to the former church they now occupy. It housed the city library until recently, when it was moved across the street to the new structure. Up until just a few weeks ago it housed the police department. Hand delivery of papers proves successful One of the common symbols of the newspaper business is the paperboy - you see him a lot in old movies, the dirty, ragged waif on the street corner hawking newspapers newspa-pers with sensational headlines that advance the movies plot: "Extra! Extra! Two-headed man terrorizes Tinseltown!" Well, a lot of things about the news business have changed since the 1940s. We don't do many extra editions any more. Television made them obsolete. And paperboys have become be-come "paper carriers" as young women have joined the work force. They don't sell their papers from street corners, either. And two-headed two-headed monster stories are most commonly found in the tabloids near the check-out stand at the grocery store. And in the past, the newspaper carrier was associated with daily newspapers, while most folks expected ex-pected to tecerye their hometown . weekly in the mailbox.1 Well, that' changing, too. And there's a good chance if you are reading this column on Wednesday morning, you've benefited from the changes we are undergoing at the newspaper as we move from mail-delivery mail-delivery tohand-delivery, and turn over the job of getting our paper to your doorstep from the letter carrier car-rier to the newspaper carrier. This is no slight on our local letter carriers. They do a marvelous marvel-ous job delivering our mail - and getting our papers to everyone who subscribes to the paper. And over the years, weekly newspapers and local post offices have developed strong relationships. After all, we have been their best customer. Every week, week in and week out, for decades this paper has been taken to the post office for delivery. After we started the shopper, we provided a weekly delivery for every home in the city. Never say By RAC1IAEL C. MURDOCK When we're observers of an activity, ac-tivity, we're usually real experts on it. We often watch someone else handle a problem, and describe what we would do differently with absolutes, abso-lutes, such as "I would never," or "I will always." Well, as an English teacher once told me, "Positively never ever without fail, absolutely at no time should you ever use absolutes." This is absolutely true when describing what kind of parent you're going to be. Use absolutes, and they'll probably comeback tohaunt you. In my luxurious days of pre-child pre-child parenting, I was annoyed by people excusing their children's completely mismatched or inappropriate inappro-priate clothing by saying, "They dressed themselves this morning." When I'm a mom, I though to . myself, I won't let them have torn clothes in their drawers. I even considered buying clothes that were all in the same color scheme so anything they picked out would Thanks to kidney donatio I Editor: Since this is an anniversary of sorts for me and the first day of National Donor Awareness Week, I feel it is past the time that I should thank the family of the young man who was tragically taken from this life in an accident. You have to understand. At a time of terrible grief, sorrow and loss of a loved one, they did something some-thing special for people that they never knew and may never know. They made what had to be one of the hardest decisions of their life. the editor's column By MARC HADDOCK We have developed the most comprehensive computer listing of mail delivery in our respective cities cit-ies -- with each address coded fey delivery route and delivery or3er.i That way we could provide the mail -.-carriers with the papers in the order they were to be delivered. But over the years, as you well know, mail delivery has become more and more expensive. And much of the burden of increasing mail costs has been given to second and third class mail - the bulk mail rates we are charged to deliver our newspapers and shoppers. Last year, third class mail took a tremendous hike. Another increase looms in the near future. The result is it's just getting too expensive to mail you our newspapers. newspa-pers. And so our publisher, Brett Bezzant, decided we would have to find another way to get our papers into your hands. He turned to the method that has been successful for daily newspaper for years hand delivery. We started using young newspaper news-paper carriers last October - only a "Never" when it comes Discoveries look acceptable. But most of all, I would never let them go out in public looking like urchins. I would change their clothes first. Hopefully, I never voiced that thought out loud to any real parent. par-ent. Areal parent would have known that the reason this plan worked at first is that I was still in control. I read that children should make choices about their life, including what to wear, so I'd hold up two pair of pants and tell the child to choose one. Then I would pick an appropriate matching shirt. ' That was before I was ousted from the control position in a number of things, clothing included. I lost the control to say that corduroy pants aren't appropriate for a trip to the swimming pool and shorts will be uncomfortable for They decided to let their loved one lecome a donor. I cannot imagine a more difficult diffi-cult decision that a parent or spouse could ever face. What I want them to realize is , how that decision has changed my life. You see, I am the husband of a loving wife and the father of four kids. More than two yeRrs ago, I was on dialysis. Every day I wondered won-dered if life would ever improve. I could not put in a full days work. I could not eat normally. I could not g places that I wanted to But one by one, the entities that occupied the Memorial Building have moved out to more modern facilities - and with no occupants, the building is starting to deteriorate - with stucco noticebly falling off the outside of the structure. ' . . About the same time the city was deciding to build the new administration building, an architectural firm from Salt Lake submitted, at the city council's request, a costfeasibility study for restoring the Memorial Building. The cost came in about $120,000 less than building a new administration building. Herein lies the issue. The mayor has determined that Lehi City will be better served by renovating the Memorial Building than building a new administration building -- despite the council's decision to build the new structure. And so he refused to sign the paper that would have completed the process awarding the bid - and held off doing so until the low bid on the new administration building was withdrawn last week. Since the Mayor's refusal to sign the contract awarding the bid, a free-for-all has erupted in Lehi, with citizens groups banding together to save the Memorial Building and a frustrated City Council thwarted by a Mayor who has opted a power he doesn't have -- the power of veto. Utah cities with Lehi's form of government - and that includes most of North Utah County' - work on the premise that the collective decision of the city council is the ruling factor in city handful at first, with 500 papers hand delivered that first week. Then we surveyed to see how our readers like the method. Gradually we added more hand deliverers, and we kept asking our readers how they liked the new system. The results? "It has exceeded our highest expectations," says the publisher. This morning, more than half of our American Fork newspapers will be hand-delivered and available to you to be read with breakfast. In Lehi and Pleasant Grove, 40 percent per-cent will be delivered by hand. We still rely on the mail for more than half of our 14,375 newspaper deliveries deliv-eries - but we don't expect it to stay at that level for long. . And thafs good. Because our surveys indicates that most of you like hand delivery, and many of you prefer it. tj The success is due to a lot of factors; Dorothy Lovericlge; our "drculation manager,,,bas: apent( months sweating blood to make the conversions to hand delivery and to get the system organized. And Brett has developed a system sys-tem that works very well for our area. Barbara Christiansen, our classified ads manager and a reporter, re-porter, has helped organize the routes as well. But the backbone of the system is our carriers. The original handful hand-ful has grown to 7 1 and keeps growing. grow-ing. We've had some who didn't get up, or who didn't get all their papers pa-pers delivered. But for the most part, our carriers have performed extraordinarily well. Who are these new deliverers of the news? They range in age from 10 to adults many of them members mem-bers of the same family. They have routes designed for close-to-home delivery where possible, with deliveries de-liveries at every home a newspaper newspa-per for subscribers and a shopper playing in the snow. I also lost any pull in what colors match. My opinion opin-ion on such matters is no longer considered. Therefore, one warm day when child number one pulled on brown corduroy pants and a gray T-shirt with orange lettering, we were in trouble. His socks didn't match, either, but socks I can live with. The shirt looked pretty embarrassing. embarrass-ing. Now, when a teenager goes out in torn clothes or in an outfit which includes florals, plaids and stripes in the same shirt, people assume that the child's parents would never have dressed him that way, and the child picked that outfit himself or herself. The child, however, is a toddler, and most people expect parents to have somewhat more say over how they look. Maybe on a good day I would. But his day, there was no changing his mind. . I presented several alternative shirts and even a different pair of pants, to no avail. I even waited received gift go. I was constantly sick, tired and very seldom got out of bed. I was not a husband. I was not a father. I worried how much longer I could go without providing a decent de-cent income for my family. I know that I was a constant worry for my wife and kids. They also had no idea if I would live like that for the rest of my life. Then there was the question, how much longer is the rest of my life.? . . That question was answered on April 22, lftHH. 1 received a call for non-subscribers. Most deliver between 80 and 100 papers each Wednesday morning morn-ing before 8 a.m. It takes them less than an hour, and they average almost $4 an hour - $17 a month. We give them incentives to sell subscriptions; one carrier made over $30 in a month by getting 12 new subscribers to the paper along with his deliveries. They don't worry about collecting collect-ing or keeping track of who subscribes sub-scribes on their routes - we use the same computer billing system as before to handle the paper work. A few drive to the dispersed routes, but most carriers walk. Some make newspaper delivery on Wednesday morning a family affair af-fair and use the experience to teach their children the responsibility and the rewards that come from working. work-ing. Our readers like getting the news earlier - when it's fresher. This has truly been a win-win situation . pur only drawback has been the shortage of carriers in some locations loca-tions -- especially in the center of Lehi and Pleasant Grove. Anyone interested in delivering newspapers newspa-pers every Wednesday morning in these areas is welcome to come to our American Fork Office (59 West Main) and fill out an application. (Bring along your social security number.) When I started working on weekly newspapers conventional wisdom said you couldn't make hand-delivery work on a once-a-week basis. It has been fun to prove conventional wisdom wrong and to provide our readers with more timely service as well. If you're not getting your paper hand-delivered, you can probably look forward to the service in the near future. It is a change in the way we do business that seems to benefit everyone. to kids until we had to go somewhere, then attempted to change the shirt myself. Child and offending shirt were quickly out of reach. So we went out in public with my child looking pretty much like an urchin. And whenever the opportunity op-portunity arose, I was quick to inform in-form people, with a mixture of pride and chagrin, that he had chosen his clothing himself. And clothing is not by any means the only place premature decisions on parenting are dashed. A friend said her pre-parent-hood absolute was that she would never let her children go out of the house with dirty faces. She still remembers the first time in the store that she looked down and saw all her children smiling up at her with black smudges all over their cheeks. It happens to the best of us, with he highest parenting ideals. So I have a new philosophy on parenting. parent-ing. I'm not absolutely sure what it is, but I'm positively certain it includes in-cludes absolutely no absolutes. of normal life? from the University Hospital that changed the rest of my life. I re ceived a "new" kidney that has brought my life back to normal. ' At this point, I feel every bit as good and healthy as I did long before be-fore my kidney failure. I am able to work and to take my family anywhere any-where they want to go. I am a normal husband. I am a normal dad. I I constantly think of the family ,4jat lost their loved one. I wish t hat I could talk to them and show them that their gift of life for me government. Mayors have not been given the right to pick and choose which council directives they will follow, they must follow them all. If they refuse to do so, the city council can simply appoint a mayor pro-tem and move ahead with city business - whether the mayor sits in his seat or not. But it is a messy step, and in this case would probably only serve to complicate the matter further. The philosophy behind our form of representative democracy is simple - people elect officials and then those officials act to the best of their ability to run our government. And when the matter comes to a vote - the majority rules. " ' ' ' r By refusing to act on the council's direction, Mayor Cash hass circumvented that system. True, he believes he is doing it for the good of the community. But under our system of government, this decision is not his to make. Whether the Memorial Building is renovated, whether Lehi City gets a new administration building, whether it moves its city offices into the Memorial Bulding or leaves them where they are all remains to be determined. i t Regardless of the outcome of the controversy, Lehi City has lost something in the process. ! The community has been polarized, the will of the city's elected representatives has been circumvented, and the relationship relation-ship between the mayor and his council has been damaged. If the new building is built, it will no w cost Lehi more than it would have had the original bid been accepted. The hidden costs in this situation may trouble the community for years to come. First names are more than just a name 7 Well, folks, another expert has m been heard from. He is Leslie Alan now one of the great experts on names. He makes this statement, "Our first names are not merely names. Frequently they act as our ambassadors, ambas-sadors, representing us to the outside out-side world. They are a part of our personality as others see us often as we see ourselves." I have always believed with Shakespeare who wrote, "What's in a name," but now I must change my thinking. For example, my father was a religious man. His oldest son he named after an Old Testament prophet. The next two he named after leading lights in the New Ts?tamentVA t I wonderwhat he was thinking of when he gave m a New, Testa?, ment and an Old Testament name. My second name is Joseph, after he of the many-colored coat. Then he gave me my first name, Thomas. What was my dear old dad thinking of when he gave me this name - for the Thomas of the New Testament was known for one thing, a characteristic to doubt. I realize that first names in some instances can affect our lives. I have written about my boyhood boy-hood friend whose parents named him Chumley. All of his life he was called Scrummy, and the name fit his personality and physical appearance. ap-pearance. I can't help but think that if his parents had given him some sexy or glamorous name it would not have changed old Scrummy. I once had an acquaintance with the name of Algernon. With a name like that you would expect to see a little gentleman, but Algernon was the meanest, toughest kid you ever saw. Now, was it the name his parents par-ents gave him that shaped his personality per-sonality or was it because his father fa-ther was a boxer and loved to visit the village pub and quaff the ale? There is a possibility that a first name can give you confidence. To illustrate. A young boy was applying for a job. "What's your name?" asked the store manager. "Ford," replied the lad. "And your first name?" inquired the manager. "Henry." "Henry Ford, eh," said the manager with a smile. "That's a Letter to the Editor A Cappella choir Editor: I just returned from a command performance given by the American Ameri-can Fork A Cappella Choir at the LDS chapel in Arlington, Va. These talented young people made a very favorable impression let's help Deon Gurney and others was well received. I may never know them. But I hope they may read this and realize how their Christ-like, unselfish act has changed my life. I want to tell them thank you. Those two words can never express my true appreciation. But thank you , again! ',, , I would also like to mention that this is a time that we should all be aware of the Deon Gurney family. They need all of us athis time of, ' need. There are so many ways that we could help them. We need to sit ff T9 WU iff If 3 By TOM GRIFFITHS B pretty well known name.''; The boy looked pleased. "Yes, sir, it should be," he replied proudly. "I've been delivering groceries around town for two years now." .So,. what's in aame? Tlwex perts might say that a name can influence our lives! but! say there i are many more things can affect our destinies than a name. As I write this bit of nonsense there is a thunderstorm going on outside. Priceless, God-given rain is falling. Thunder is echoing through our valley. One cannot escape having a feeling of gratitude. grati-tude. I must walk outside and feel the rain on my face. As to the thunder: thun-der: When I was a young boy I was afraid of it. One time when there was a particularly bad thunderstorm thunder-storm going on I went to my mother for comfort. - "Mam," I said, "What is thunder and why does it frighten me?" Her answer was not the least bit scientific, but I have thought about it many times. , "My son," she said, "thunder is the method by which God talks to the wicked people. First comes the lightening from the heavens to show his power, then he speaks with a loud voice." She went to a cupboard and brought out the family Bible. She turned to Psalms 18 and read: "The Lord thundered in the heavens, and the highest gave his voice; hail stones and coals of fire. Yea, he sent out his arrows and scattered them; and he shot out lightnings and discomforted them." "So, you see," she said, "If you are not wicked there is nothing to be afraid of when it thunders." The hills and trees are washed clean. The rain drops drippingfrom the trees look like tears of joy. Indeed the world is good even if you do have an odd name. was great on the East Coast sophisticates in the audience. Craig King, Bryant Magleby and I were very proud to be alumni of AFHS. -Kirk Magleby Washington, D.C. back, look at ourselves, and decide in what way we could help them. Even I have no idea of the torment tor-ment and worry that their family is going through. I was fortunate enough to have medical insurance that covered my transplant'and all the medication afterward! They do : not have that available to them.. Let's help them in any way that we can. ' --Roy F. Jensen American Fork - ' ft.