Andrew Steele commentary, Feb. 2

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Hammond Public Library patrons learned last week that the library is going to begin charging $1 for DVD check-outs. It’s also closed branches.

Gary library patrons are in the midst of a downsizing that will close the main branch and eliminate 15 full-time and 9 part-time jobs.

Crown Point, meanwhile, continues to see its big new library go up on Main Street, and Lake County’s main library is undergoing a major renovation.

‘Twas ever thus, to some extent. People move, communities shrink and others grow, with de-urbanization a constant trend in recent generations. Gary, in particular, has struggled with its shrinking, and only with a forceful shove from the state has become fully engaged in it.

But all this does make one wonder about how we organize “communities” and pay for public goods.

The fetish of government consolidation in recent years has included libraries. It assumes, without much in the way of evidence, that bigger is cheaper.

There are, indeed, some savings to be had in a consolidation, but there are also savings inherent in keeping control as close to the “people” as possible. I really can’t imagine a county-wide system employing dramatically fewer people than the several systems we now have.

It likely would have built a smaller, and cheaper, “branch” library in Crown Point — or simply kept the old one — but why should the “county” make that decision?

And once you create a “county-wide” anything, well, it becomes a monster, with expenses and positions the advocates of consolidation have yet to dream.

Ideally there would be isolated areas in which libraries could share expenses — perhaps for e-books or music, maybe even for regular books and DVDs — with some metric based on patron population to decide how money is split. In this, as in most things, there should be a middle ground that recognizes you can’t force “community” on a geographic area but that also recognizes there are ways to mitigate the disruptions and hardships one community faces while others reap the benefits.

Another issue that runs up against the difficulty of defining community is the Little Calumet River watershed tax the state seems close, at this writing, to making law.

It assesses a fee to all property owners in the watershed, but some officials in places not directly impacted by Little Cal flooding, mainly Hobart and Merrillville, don’t think they should have to pay as much as those more at risk.

Applying the fee to the watershed gives it a good, technical basis, but lends itself to the criticism that Hobart and Merrillville have levelled.

This is one instance in which “going big” — as opposed to “going small” with something like a library — makes more sense. But it should be bigger than a watershed. Dealing with the big things — geography, environment, etc. — is exactly why we have a governmental unit as big as a state.

The state has jurisdiction over this, and the cost should be shared among all its residents.