By Kirk Ross
Really nice to see the town officially breaking ground on the Chapel Hill Public Library expansion. To tell you the truth, going into this year I wouldn’t have given such a thing great odds. It seemed like 2011 was almost destined to be the year of the library flub, at least in southern Orange County where both towns went through their own tussle with the county over funding. Both the town council and board of aldermen had to suss out a way forward for library services amid an ever-tightening budget and a seriously strapped and at times recalcitrant board of commissioners.
Yet here we are at the end of the year with something resembling peace in the valley between the governing bodies, expansion underway in Chapel Hill and at least some working ideas for a way forward in Carrboro.
Let’s take a look at how we got from A to B.
For Chapel Hill, the fight with the county has been going on for several years now, with the county maintaining a static level of monetary support while costs for operating the ever-busier Chapel Hill Public Library have gone up. Attempts to work out a deal have not gone smoothly.
When an issue that matters to a large swath of people lingers unresolved through several election cycles, a bitter history can build up.
Undoing that knot can prove to be the toughest challenge. Going into the year, things had gotten so bad that Chapel Hill was on the verge of starting to charge non-residents for library usage, a move that didn’t make sense given geography, tradition, municipal borders and the makeup of the school system. It wasn’t even a lateral move; funding would have surely dropped. But in the heat of the fight with the county it seemed to some members of the council that it was the only move available.
Thankfully, the fee schedule wasn’t adopted, and after a long, hard slog, the talks recently bore fruit. Early next year, the council will vote on a plan adopted by the county to gradually increase library funding by 3 percent until it reaches levels that make more sense, given the CHPL’s contribution to library services in the county.
Chapel Hill also threw itself a curveball early in the year when it took a serious look at relocating to the mall in the space now occupied by a Dillard’s store in full holiday shopping frenzy.
You could argue that it was a positive exercise in outside-the-box thinking, but it added a lot of anxiety to the already-nervous regular users of the Pritchard Park location as well as the cadre of library supporters who fought for passage of the 2003 bond referendum to pay for the expansion and then watched the project lose momentum and experience delays. No group was more relieved when the gold shovels hit the ground last weekend.
To the west, the big library flub of 2011 started with the surprise choice by the county last year of a site near Carrboro Elementary School for its southwest library branch. That laid the groundwork this year for an uncomfortable and divisive tussle in which longtime advocates for a freestanding Carrboro library saw the site as a must while its neighbors saw it as disastrous.
It took the site’s closest neighbors, Cray and Kathy Gunn, who run the kind of small business we love to cheer on around here, pouring their savings into a successful legal challenge that helped expose the problems with the site. They shouldn’t have had to do that.
Now we’re back to square one, but at least tempers have cooled a bit, and hopefully a more open and deliberate site search can move forward. The county’s recent retooling of the site criteria for a southwestern branch was a good first step.
These are tough fiscal times, and with the towns filling in they are also difficult times to find the right location and design for a major public facility that will be in use for several decades or more. As people in Chapel Hill found out, even having a solid majority of voters on record in support is no guarantee that something will happen.
You can stamp these decisions by our elected leaders overdue, but at least they finally got around to turning them in.