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A ‘commitment to lifelong learning’

The proposal Mayor Mike Ragsdale put on the table to create a new downtown library to replace Knox County’s outgrown facility on Church Avenue is going to kick up a fuss. That much is easy to surmise after seeing the results of a local public-opinion poll on library usage and after hearing County Commissioner Mary Lou Horner tell a television audience Sunday that we don’t need one.

We do need a bigger and better library. Remember, the same Mary Lou Horner was the retro-commissioner who said not all that long ago, in the 1990s in fact, that we didn’t need computers in the public schools. The idea that she doesn’t think she needs a library should be evident in her remarks.

More disturbing is the information on library usage that was aired last week on WBIR-TV 10. Channel 10’s poll, taken in Knox County by Survey USA, a public-opinion and market-research group out of New Jersey, showed that 77 percent of those asked how often they use the library system said less than twice a month, and 63 percent said they wouldn’t use a downtown library, even if parking were easily available.

Perhaps it should be somewhat reassuring to see that 30 percent would use the library if they had the kind of parking Ragsdale envisions providing at the site, along Church Avenue next to State Street. And the 22 percent who do use the library twice or more each month is a decent number, particularly when the daytime sampling that the pollsters made is taken into account. People at home in the daytime are not fully representative of the Knox County population. Still, the whole survey is discouraging. Only a few weeks ago, the county was floating an earlier poll that showed more than 80 percent of Knox Countians supported a new library.

Mike Cohen, Ragsdale’s mouthpiece, says there is a petition now circulating that works to bolster the county mayor’s position.

“Just in the first couple of days after the announcement [last Thursday], 475 people had signed a petition supporting the library proposal,” Cohen says. He also says that when 30 people stood up to speak for or against the mayor’s budget at a Monday hearing, 27 supported the budget, including the library, and only three opposed it.

The petition going around says that the new library “will demonstrate that our community is committed to lifelong learning” and that it will also attract people downtown and make the whole library branch system stronger.

“Please vote to support funding for the new library,” the petition concludes. The signers knew or should have known that Ragsdale’s ballpark figure on the cost of a showcase library is “up to $45 million.” That’s indeed a pretty penny, but the county can’t get along for long without a much better central library than it now has.

“Look at what the new library has done for downtown Nashville. Look at Denver and Des Moines. Kansas City is working on one,” says Cohen, partly echoing what his boss said in the “state of the community” speech in which the library was proposed for the old News Sentinel site, which he’s asking the city to donate. He didn’t suggest an outright swap for the county’s property two blocks north along State Street, but he could have.

Ragsdale says the library we build should feature “the same quality and permanence as our new East Tennessee History Center.” It should, but it should also allow for expansion in ways the current central library does not. Then we wouldn’t have to go through this again in 25 or 30 years and listen to a Commissioner Horner lament and disparage the whole process of civilization and human development all over again.

May 13, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 20 © 2004 Metro Pulse