Skip to content
The Archive of The Carrboro Citizen
Menu
  • Home
  • News
  • Community
  • Schools
  • Business
  • Opinion
  • Obituaries
  • Sports
  • Mill
  • Flora
  • Print Archive
  • About
Menu

BIG CITY: Strange difficulty in recognizing a win

Posted on July 14, 2011 by Staff

By Kirk Ross

Hey, all you library patrons, here’s something for your summer reading list: a six-page team-written work of nonfiction that while kinda dry — OK, really dry — spells out how the county and Chapel Hill are going to move forward on the library issue.

The title just jumps right off the shelf: “Interlocal Agreement by and between Orange County and the Town of Chapel Hill Regarding Funding of the Chapel Hill Municipal Library and Improved Interoperability of Library Systems.” If you ask the clerk nicely, she may even get you a signed copy.

The lengthy battle over library funding flared up about four years ago as the town contemplated how to cover the costs of a voter-approved expansion of the library building. It arose from a long-running dispute over county support of Chapel Hill’s library, which by policy treats all county residents as it would town citizens.

The issue all along has been about money. The county’s $250,000-per-year support remained static for more than a decade while Chapel Hill’s costs went up. With the library expansion, those costs were really going to jump. County officials were certainly aware of the difficulties and costs of staffing a bigger library – the costs of opening the new main branch of the county system in Hillsborough spurred many hours of discussion by the commissioners.

So for four years, the question was how much more dough the county would pony up and with what strings.

The answer is spelled out in the above-mentioned six pages, and I’m glad to hear that the town has decided to push forward toward an agreement.

This was a clear win for Chapel Hill. The county has proposed a floor for funding, a reasonable formula for increasing it and an equitable way to balance increased support for Chapel Hill and improvements to the county system.

As for interoperability, the agreement is appropriately flexible, requiring the county and town staffs to report on the matter by year’s end, but setting no hard rules or deadline for implementation.

That recognizes the difficulty in getting different systems and teams of people working together. Interoperability, as we’ve found in public safety, recreation and housing, takes time and a lot of thought to work. It’s a good goal, but it makes no sense to try to push it while the library is at University Mall.

The deal is also a win for the county because it moves the discussion beyond the funding issue and sets a mechanism that could eliminate most of the annual budget-season static about library funding.

And thankfully, the deal has put to rest the idea of charging nonresidents, which was a horrible idea. Charging those who live beyond the confines of the municipality was a money loser, an added layer of bureaucracy and an impediment to the use of a public good, all rolled into one. We have very porous borders in southern Orange and a shared school system with Carrboro and other county residents. The library’s open-door policy served us well all these years and contributed to the quality of life of this place. And, really, it is beyond me how anyone can in one breath talk about an overworked staff and in the other advocate them having to implement what would become a logistical nightmare and a change of culture none of them would want to see.

There may be a temptation to say that without the actual threat of going to a pay system for county residents, the commissioners wouldn’t have come around. But that sounds a little like Donald Trump patting himself on the back for the president finally releasing his long-form birth certificate.

To the contrary, the tough talk probably had a deleterious effect on the negotiations. According to folks on both sides, it hardened positions and dragged things out. And it sets up more obstacles in the future. In any negotiation, one of the things you have to do is dial down the signal-to-noise ratio.

The library deal finally came down not because of tirades and outrage, but because both sides managed to get beyond that and set about negotiating in the real world.

Web Archive

© 2025 The Archive of The Carrboro Citizen | Powered by Minimalist Blog WordPress Theme