By Susan Dickson, Staff Writer
The Orange County Board of Commissioners decided on Tuesday against pursuing the Skills Development Center on West Franklin Street and a site at Twins Creek Park as potential locations for a Southwest Orange County branch library.
During a budget work session, the board was unable to get much further in determining how to improve library services for the county and postponed additional discussion until a later meeting, saying they needed to develop criteria and collect more information before moving forward.
In the 2010-11 county budget, commissioners approved the closure of the Cedar Grove Library and reduced hours at the Carrboro Branch Library. In turn, county library director Lucinda Munger said she would return to the board in the fall with a library plan that would address bringing library services to rural Orange County and establishing a Southwest Orange County branch library.
Munger presented the board with several options each for improving rural library services and establishing a Southwest branch. Southwest branch options included such long-term options as acquiring a site within Carrboro for a freestanding library, developing a library at the county-owned Twin Creeks Park off N.C. 86 and Eubanks Road or adapting the county-owned Skills Development Center for either a long-term or short-term branch.
Another short-term option would be to lease a space in Carrboro.
Several commissioners said they weren’t in favor of using the Skills Development Center as a library, citing a lack of parking and other issues.
“I have several concerns about using the skills center, but the main one is parking and who would use that location,†board Chair Valerie Foushee said. “When I think about the residents who live around the skills center, it is a highly student population or … people who use university libraries.â€
Commissioner Alice Gordon said she felt that the county shouldn’t shrink the services at the Skills Development Center to put a southwest library branch there.
“It seems if anything, we should be building that up, utilizing those classrooms, not shrinking it down,†she said. “It’s a great resource. Our emphasis is jobs and skills training.â€
Commissioner Steve Yuhasz said the board should consider people who would be driving to the library and not just those who live close enough to walk.
“It is important that it serve the citizens of Carrboro, but it also needs to serve the citizens of Bingham Township, who otherwise are going to drive to Hillsborough,†he said. “There has to be adequate parking for that group of people…. We don’t want to just provide a library that will satisfy the needs of walkable Carrboro.â€
Yuhasz added that he thought the board should focus on a short-term solution to bringing library services to Southwest Orange County.
“It’s going to have to be a temporary thing, because we don’t have any money,†he said. “To try to find the money to build a freestanding southwest library in the next 10 years is going to be difficult.â€
Commissioner Barry Jacobs said he was in favor of a site that was walkable and on public transit.
“I still think that as a short-term [option], besides looking at something like the Century Center, that the Skills Development Center might be the cheapest thing we could do,†he said.
Board members asked staff to look at other site possibilities in and around Carrboro.
Rural options
Munger presented the board with several options for increasing library services in the rural parts of the county, including developing separate rural branch libraries, purchasing bookmobiles to serve rural areas, putting library kiosks in rural areas and collaborating with neighboring town and county libraries, particularly Mebane.
Yuhasz said he wanted to look at increasing public transportation from rural areas of the county to the main library in Hillsborough as an alternative to the presented options.
Commissioners said they would like to keep all of the rural options on the table for further discussion.
Munger also discussed interoperability with the Chapel Hill Public Library, as well as a potential transition out of the Hyconeechee Regional Library System. County library officials want to look at developing a system by which the Chapel Hill and county libraries could share collections and operate using a single library card.
The Town of Chapel Hill has asked the county to increase its funding of the Chapel Hill library, pointing to thousands of county residents who live outside of Chapel Hill but patronize the library. The county provides $250,000 a year to the Chapel Hill Public Library, but officials have indicated they would like to reevaluate that funding level.
In July, county and Chapel Hill officials discussed a two-year, renewable agreement for increased library funding by the county for the Chapel Hill Public Library, as well as an agreement to improve interoperability issues between the county and Chapel Hill libraries.
How do you co-operate two different library systems? The Hyconeechee Regional Library system is dependent upon the county for funding and the State of North Carolina for operation (that is where all the statistics are located). The Chapel Hill Library is a municipal library dependent for the above from the town of Chapel Hill. That is how it was organized.
Just think where the county branch in Carrboro would be if they had rightly been the recipients of the $250,000 each year. Surely by now it would have had its own facility working on a full time schedule rather than a part time operation.