The Gadfly is a series of letters offering commentary on local issues and published in the Warrensburg Gazette.

I understand that a workable agreement has been reached between the Trails Regional Library board and the City of Warrensburg on the property for the new library headquarters & Warrensburg branch. The main sticking point, as you remember, was the City’s desire for a certain configuration of meeting space. Allowing use of the library meeting space for City Council meetings and for city court sessions would free up the existing Council chambers to be converted into offices for city staff. It appears that city staff has increased over the years to exceed the available space in the circa 1980 Municipal Building.

This got me to wondering about the relative growth in city staff as compared to population growth. Census data from 1900 is available at the official state website. Since 1970, Warrensburg’s population has grown from 13,125 to 13,807 in 1980, to 15,244 in 1990 to 16,340 last year. If 1980 is used as a baseline, Warrensburg has grown about 18% over 20 years, or about 125 persons per year. Since the available census figures do not easily reflect student population, it is difficult to determine with certainty the actual resident population.

When considering city staff growth, the people who need additional office space in the Municipal Building would be administrative staff. The areas that would most reasonably grow with population growth are functional, such as fire & police protection, sewer service and the street department. These people are normally located elsewhere, and the police department is already partly funded by the county-wide law enforcement sales tax (note that Warrensburg’s percentage of county population is declining).

Since I don’t have the statistics, it would be informative if the City would publish its staff growth over the past 20 years and tell us what new functions have arisen to grow administrative staff past the physical space provided in the Municipal Building.