ViewPoints by Timothy M. Flaherty: Pleasant Hill expects budget surplus, first in four years

On Feb. 7, I delivered the mayor's State of the City address to the Pleasant Hill Chamber of Commerce, highlighting some of the city's accomplishments.

I share some excerpts here.

"We all know Pleasant Hill is a great place to live, work, raise a family, conduct business and play. Our citizens are highly educated and we have fantastic schools from preschool through college all right here in Pleasant Hill.

We have excellent parks, thanks to our Rec & Park District. Our city is walkable, it's bikeable and we have wonderful commercial areas from our northern border on Contra Costa Boulevard to the downtown and all the neighborhood commercial areas in between.

I believe that if we conducted a survey of the citizens of Pleasant Hill we would find that they love their city and they are extremely happy to be here.

The Pleasant Hill Library is one of the most highly utilized library facilities in the county, despite being open five days per week for 35 hours, which is below average for the county. It is an aging facility that needs to be replaced.

The city has been creative in finding money to support library services but more needs to be done. The City Council has adopted as one of its goals this year to organize a task force to look into the need and feasibility of a new library facility in Pleasant Hill.

It has been 10 years since the city last took an in-depth review of this issue.

Economic conditions and lack of community support at that time caused the concept to fallow. There appears to be a resurgence of interest and the purpose of the task force would be to dive into the community to reassess the situation.

Of course, the cost of a new library will take overwhelming community support in favor of financing what would be an important addition to our community.

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ViewPoints by Timothy M. Flaherty: Pleasant Hill expects budget surplus, first in four years