I've sat back and read with mild curiosity the barrage of increasingly sappy library letters that have consumed the comment section of late with a distinct feeling of deja vu. Where have I heard this before? And then it hit me: 2018. When there was fierce public debate on a second library, and some chicanery from an outgoing mayor in form of a poorly worded plebiscite that was neither binding nor concise
Nearly two-thirds of respondents voted against a second library, and the topic should have stopped right then and there. But it didn't. Working around the results of the vote, council opted to slide in a store front library in Jensen Lakes. 3700 sq ft that satisfied no one. Not the pro library crowd and definitely not the anti library opponents either. The costs? $790,000 in leasing and operating fees. Council of the day smugly said this was what the community needed. And just as it opened on Jan.1 2020, COVID-19 happened. And the library closed on March 15 2020.
During lockdown and the pandemic, the whole world went online and virtual. And we all learned to do things differently. We learned to live without a library. And we still thrived. School and work was still done. People still met. Online resources flourished. The answer to the cut in library funding is clear. Shutter the store front library, and reinvest those funds back into the main branch.
The store front library was barely justifiable pre-pandemic. Post-pandemic and faced with a 4.6 per cent tax increase, the answer is clear.
Wayne Tomash, St. Albert
