Comment on this story   Nashville Cynics have wondered whether the latest push is a symptom of an old psychological disorder that afflicted our ancestors: Nashville envy. That other city, 180 miles to the west, famously built a grandiose $65 million library downtown. The cost of the original Knox County library proposal, $45 million, is roughly proportional to what Nashville spent in terms of population. Larry Frank saw the Nashville library (above) for the first time as the newly inducted library director, and was awed. He recalls that Ragsdale asked him what he thought, and how he would rate Knox County’s library by comparison. “I said, ‘Well, they’re the New York Yankees, and we’re the Toledo Mudhens.’” Commenced during the Bredesen mayoral administration, the building, which looks something like a large marble beaux-arts train station or hotel, astonishes everyone who sees it. Almost everyone, anyway. Wanda Moody saw it for the first time on a county-commission junket to Nashville last year. “I saw a lot of waste there,” she says. “It was grand, gorgeous, nice—but I went on my own self-guided tour of it, looked in the little nooks and crannies. I saw a lot of waste.” She adds that some of the features of Nashville’s library are probably unnecessary in Knox County’s. “They have a big historical collection; we don’t need that. We already have that.” (The McClung Collection, a reference library downtown administered by KCLS, is in the process of a major expansion/renovation as part of the old Custom House project on Gay Street.) Moody mentions Nashville’s African-American section. Considering the Beck Cultural Center’s plan to move into the old Gateway Center on Volunteer Landing, “it appears that aspect’s pretty well taken care of, too.”

Knox County’s unexpected anguish over the question of a new main library

by Jack Neely

In January and February of this year, 836 Knox County residents responded by phone, e-mail and post to a public poll announced in the daily paper and on radio and television, and via handouts in county buildings. The question was, “Shall we build a new downtown central library?” A large majority of those who responded, 84 percent, answered yes. Many offered specific suggestions about parking or computer access, which were duly recorded. Library officials had expected there would be a majority who favored the library; they didn’t expect the pro-library majority to be so overwhelming. Only 13 percent answered no.

Less than six months later, several county commissioners are convinced that most of their constituents are strongly opposed to the idea of building a new main library downtown; commissioners previously enthusiastic about the project now say they’re having second thoughts.

The whole thing must be perplexing to Larry Frank, the veteran library director from the Midwest who began his term as director of the Knox County Library System one year ago after a nationwide search and a bitter controversy concerning his interim predecessor. He’s still new to town, and may not be used to the way things work, and don’t work, in Knox County. If you talk to Mr. Frank about it, you’ll likely hear him console himself, maybe more than once, by citing Benjamin Disraeli’s maxim, “Finality is not the language of politics.”

You expect newcomers to be perplexed now and then. But it may all be equally perplexing to a long-term local, County Mayor Mike Ragsdale, whose popularity has experienced a similar inversion. Some have already forgotten that during the first months of his administration, many librarians and prominent library patrons were suspicious of Ragsdale, who was regarded to be indifferent, at best, to the library system. But early in his administration, Ragsdale made it clear that he supported the construction of a new main library.

Early this year, he first proposed a $30 wheel tax. Relatively modest compared to those of most American metro areas, it passed county commission with only a little vocal dissent in May, so little that it astonished some who are accustomed to Knox County’s anti-taxation tendencies. But opposition to the wheel tax seems to have metastasized in the last six weeks, and much of the opposition is based on the assumption that the two most surprising proposals of the Ragsdale administration, the wheel tax and the new main library, are evil Siamese twins.

Earlier this month, Ragsdale surprised everyone again by shifting the library’s likeliest site from the old News Sentinel block on Gay Street to the always-a-bridesmaid State Street site—to be combined with the city-federal transit center project.

The whole thing may be altogether different next week—or even before we go to press.

That Knox County needs a bigger main library has come up frequently in recent years; Metro Pulse has written about it before. It’s an issue that hasn’t been much questioned—at least, not until this summer.

Librarians actually saw a need as early as the mid-1980s. “That’s when the shelves started getting tight, and we began moving out tables to put in more,” says longtime reference librarian Nelda Hill. “By 1990, when we automated, things were getting really tight.”

Within a few years, the public was noticing problems. On Sunday afternoon, the library’s most popular time of the week, it’s often hard to find a place to sit down. During the school year, children are obliged to sprawl out on the carpeted floor to work on research papers.

When major visiting authors like Nikki Giovanni speak at the library’s free-to-the-public programs, they speak in a windowless basement room with about 30 school-type chairs. Often audience members have to stand.

Fifteen reference librarians and a clerk share an office smaller than the office of a typical junior partner in a law firm. It’s crowded with seven desks. “I have an appointment to use this desk until 3:00,” says Melissa Brenneman. “And this is my drawer.” She pulls it open to show it off, a standard shoebox-sized drawer. Each librarian, some of whom have worked here for over a decade, is allocated one desk drawer to arrange as she pleases. About 10 of the librarians take turns sharing three computers. They say calls to reference services are on the increase.

The library’s popular free computer classes meet not in a classroom, but in an open space on the second-floor carpet, between reading tables and shelves of books. Most of the classes are full to capacity. In the last year, 312 would-be attendees were turned away due to lack of space and terminals.

Librarians say some promising proposals for new services are made difficult or impossible by the size of the current building. Frank mentions a literacy center, which he believes to be a real need in this region. Other librarians mention space-consuming high-tech equipment, like computerized “readers” offered by the library system in Charlotte, N.C., which translate text into spoken word for the sight-impaired.

Dale Watermulder, longtime chief of the library’s audio-visual department, deadpans, “We have no problems that four times the space wouldn’t solve.” He and his small staff herd the library’s collection of over 27,000 CDs, DVDs, videotapes, talking books, etc., around in an area smaller than some taco stands. It’s all available to be borrowed via the computer, but much of the collection’s in storage; he’d like to display more of it to the public than space allows.

The worst crowding is out of sight. In a cramped industrial catacomb, two levels with a metal floor in between, wedged awkwardly between the basement children’s room and the federal-building’s gated, high-security loading area, are 20,000 volumes in deep storage. Some are on shelves, but many of them are packed in cardboard boxes, and hard to get at. Every day, when a computer informs a patron that a desired book is in “storage,” a reference librarian descends into the basement to retrieve a book, CD or tape that the patron needs. Books are condemned to storage based on infrequency of request. Down there is everything from old census information to most of the well-known Janes series about military ships, to most of the library’s collection of Mitchell’s series of auto-repair manuals, to a biography of Sen. Hugh Lawson White, the only Knoxvillian who made a major-party run for president.

A few locals suspect the fight over the library may have roots in ancient class suspicions (where else could that “latte” allegation come from?), the urban-versus-suburban dynamic, and, as one observer put it, “the old city mouse versus country mouse thing.”

When it comes to the city and the country collaborating on funding a mutual library, it’s been an uneasy 75 years or so. The city-county suspicion goes way back, especially as it concerns the library; before 1928, citizens who lived outside of Knoxville’s corporate limits weren’t allowed to use Lawson McGhee Library. Later, when the library attempted to appeal to rural residents with a bookmobile, some country folks were distrustful. A few librarians are old enough to remember when many prospective patrons in the countryside disapproved of books other than the Bible. The city was known in some rural parts of Knox County as “the corporation”, and was widely regarded as a crowded den of iniquity. One librarian recalls when a Hardin Valley resident condemned the bookmobile, “That might be all right for people in the corporation—but our boys out here don’t have time for it.”

Later, when city residents felt overtaxed in supporting the combined system, it forced a lawsuit that separated the two. Over the next 20 years, before the systems recombined, the city always proved it was far more willing to invest in a library services than was the county, sometimes investing more than seven times as much for a library that served fewer people than the county’s. The county returned as part of a merger in 1967, but some librarians were nervous when the Tyree administration, in a cost-cutting move, ceded the city’s control of the whole system over to the county in the early ‘80s.

Today, the priorities of urban and rural Knoxvillians aren’t as divergent as they were 50 years ago; county commissioners are quick to say that rural people are much more likely to be educated than they used to be. But for the last 20 years, some librarians and library patrons have never been quite certain about whether to trust county government to keep the library up to speed.

The current Lawson McGhee Library, built in 1971 to serve chiefly an urban population in a pre-computer era, has since become the headquarters library for a rapidly growing county, with more than twice the population the original library was intended to serve. The 70,000-square-foot space is among America’s smaller metropolitan main libraries. Chattanooga’s and Lexington’s library systems both provide more space per capita in their main libraries. The new Blount County Library building in Maryville has more floor space than Lawson McGhee.

“It was a really good library in the early ‘70s,” says David Atkins, a professional librarian who’s in charge of delivery services at UT. “But here we are 30 years later in a growing, booming city. KCLS is blessed with many talented people with a can-do spirit. They’ve been through a lot, but they give a lot.”

Thousands of Knox Countians use the main library weekly. A total of 190,000—about half the men, women, and children in Knox County—have library cards. Some of them rarely or never go to the main library, but often visit the branches. Others haven’t been to the library since school days. From the sound of things, some voters may even be skeptical of the sort of people who do go to any library. A recent letter to the daily paper alleged that the new library will exist chiefly “to serve latte.”

Sure enough, one of Frank’s changes to Lawson McGhee was to transform a small anteroom sometimes used for occasional exhibits into a coffee/lounge space, with a coffee-vending machine. Latte is 90 cents a cup. But few come to the library just for coffee; most folks who drink it are at the library for other reasons.

Ask Frank about the need for a new library, and he seems hardly to know where to start. “It’s beyond urgent,” he says. He mentions the space required in serving more than twice as many patrons as in 1971, and the specific space requirements of new technology, and the fact that the library’s collection is much smaller than it should be for a metropolitan area this size. The main library’s current collection comprises about 300,000 books, tapes, CDs, and DVDs. “Based upon the development of Knox County, the demographics, based upon requests that we receive every day for materials...we’re projecting a need within the next 20-30 years of a minimum of 720-750,000 volumes. We actually have that need right now, but we’re pacing ourselves.”

Mike Ragsdale, who before his mayoral career frequented the library’s western branches, says he first noticed the problem with the main library downtown shortly after his inauguration. “On a Sunday afternoon, I went to the downtown public library, and there were not enough seats. People were literally sitting on the floor. I thought, ‘We can do better as a community.’ I thought that was a priority.”

Ragsdale’s first proposal was to build a $45 million main-library project—not nearly what Nashville spent, but a figure perhaps proportional to Knox County’s smaller population.

“The tax money that’s spent on libraries in Tennessee is small,” Frank says. (Other sources confirm that Tennessee ranks 49th of the 50 states in local and state funding for public libraries.) “It’s minuscule in comparison to the amounts spent in states like Ohio or New York. Or Virginia or North Carolina. Virginia and North Carolina spend in the $20 range per capita on libraries. We’re just over $10 per capita. We couldn’t begin to compare ourselves to the Chapel Hill area in the amount of money we spend on materials. But we’re just as vital an area as Chapel Hill.”

At the front of the library-opposition juggernaut is one Gary Sellers of Strawberry Plains, who works for a supply company in East Knoxville. He began and is coordinating the petition drive against the wheel tax. He seems to be motivated chiefly by his opposition to spending county funds to build a new library downtown.

Without a library, he says, he’d “possibly” support a wheel tax. “But not now. It’s ridiculous,” he says. He says he’s not against libraries in general, and in fact says he uses his own branch of the library system; he says anything’s available at the branches, through couriers. He just doesn’t think the public should pay for a new main library.

“It should be funded by private interests, without the taxpayer funding it,” he says. Sellers admits he doesn’t have handy examples of other public libraries that are funded that way.

He’s also particularly opposed to building a library downtown. “The biggest thing that I’ve heard from my people,” he says, speaking in the lingo of an elected official, “is that there’s not ample parking, and there’s too many one-way streets. It doesn’t make sense. Just go uptown and try to find your way around. If you’re not familiar with it, you’ll circle around several blocks before you find what you need.”

Though some formerly one-way streets have opened to two-way traffic, including Lawson McGhee’s Church Avenue, some one-way streets will probably always be a feature of downtown Knoxville. As for parking, though, plans for a new library call for provisions of hundreds of parking spaces, and Frank is insisting they be free to library patrons for the first few hours of each visit.

Downtown?

The idea that the main library should be somewhere other than downtown is popping up all over the county. “There’s a real variety” of site proposals, Frank says, based on a year of answering his own phone: “I had a lady from Fort Sanders call me and talk to me, and she asked me, ‘Why can’t you locate a central library in the Fort Sanders area?’ Somebody suggested Old City. Somebody suggested the fairgrounds. Or even merging it with the university. But their mission’s different. And I’ve got a lot of people saying, ‘Why don’t you put the main library out in the county?’”

The question, “Why should the county build a library in the city?” has been asked this summer too many times to count. But as reference librarian Janet Drumheller has found, many county residents don’t realize that the city is as much “in the county” as Halls or Farragut, and that city residents pay county taxes, too. County officials say there’s no easy way to tell whether the larger part of county revenues originate inside the city or outside of it, but it’s fair to say that a huge amount of Knox County’s revenue comes from taxpayers inside the city of Knoxville.

Some think the new library should be in a suburban area: the neighborhood mentioned most often is Cedar Bluff, which already hosts the county library system’s most-visited branch location. Some commissioners say the pro-Cedar Bluff contingent is a significant part of the anti-main-library-downtown faction.

Proponents often use the phrase “the center of population” to describe Cedar Bluff—it even appears in the public-comment synopsis. The “center of population” phrase, as applied to Cedar Bluff, has been employed before, to advance various development projects. The truism has been widely cited for over 20 years, though never supported by demographic data.

Regardless of numerous new suburban developments out west, the Metropolitan Planning Commission finds, based on the 2000 census, that the population center of Knox County residents, and presumably of Knox County taxpayers, is still near the county’s geographical center, on the northwest side of the Lonsdale area, about two miles from downtown.

As for the county’s highest concentrations of population, areas closer to the city center are still higher in population density than Cedar Bluff; the most populous area per acre is still, by a very wide margin, the Fort Sanders area—which is within walking distance of downtown.

A main library in Cedar Bluff, of course, would be something of an inconvenience to county taxpayers in Mascot or Corryton, who live 30 or more miles away, and might need to burn two or three gallons of gasoline just to get there and back. Cedar Bluff would also be inconvenient to the 40,000 Knox Countians who don’t have ready access to automobiles.

“Everyone wants Lawson McGhee in their neighborhood,” Drumheller says. “And we just can’t afford to do that.”

Ragsdale says the library should be downtown, explaining it simply: “Every area has a core, and the center of Knoxville is also the center of Knox County.” County government, the county sheriff’s office, all the county courts are downtown. County Commission meets downtown. County road signs from Halls to Seymour are emblazoned with the county logo, which is a stylized version of the old Knox County Courthouse tower, which is also downtown.

Commissioner Wanda Moody, who seems a little taken aback by public opposition to the library, and is not yet sold on it, believes, “if we’re gonna build one, it ought to be downtown.”

Commissioner John Schmid, some of whose constituents would like to see a main library in the Bearden area, agrees. “The library should be part of a broader strategy of helping downtown, to attract the young professionals that businesses look for, our next entrepreneurial class.”

That’s speculative, of course. But today, downtown already hosts Knox County’s highest concentration of office workers, close to 20,000 in all, from lawyers to government officials, many of whom have frequent use for a public library for research. Downtown is also within walking distance of the University of Tennessee. Librarians say they get significant traffic from UT students and professors alike. On an average day, Lawson McGhee typically gets 400 flesh-and-blood visitors, more than any of the branches. Larry Frank says that number astonishes suburbanites who assume the downtown location is underused.

Still, there’s skepticism about downtown from both suburbanites and rural residents who see downtown as just another rival neighborhood, and one that has gotten more than its fair share of attention and public funding lately.

Frank says some condemn the project by calling it a “downtown library.” There are also practical reasons to keep it downtown, he says. “It’s not a ‘downtown library,’” he says. “It’s a central library. It serves the whole county. We send out thousands of materials on a daily basis, every week, to the branches.” He says the library needs to be in a central location, for the convenience of the couriers and fairness to all the branches.

The Main Library Vs. the Branches

Commissioner Mary Lou Horner, who has expressed some skepticism about the library project, says, “What I am hearing from some of my constituents is the fact that we have our own at Halls, and they love their own library, and we’ll be opening one soon in Fountain City, and they love that new library.” She says that though some Fountain Citians have expressed concern that a city of this size should have a bigger library downtown with more resources, most seem content with what they’ve got.

Gary Sellers on the east side and Cedar Bluff patrons on the west side all seem happy about their branches. Sellers boasts that he can get anything in the Knox County Library system by courier. Wanda Moody has heard similar stories from her constituents. “They say, ‘I go to my neighborhood branch, and if what I want’s not there, I put in an order, and it’s there.’”

The Knox County Library System has been called “overbranched.” With 17 branches, Knox County has far more branch libraries per capita than Chattanooga, Nashville or Memphis. Knox County seems to have more library branches per capita than most library systems in the United States. A few midwestern library systems, like Cleveland and Toledo, Ohio, have more—but their governments spend much much more, per capita, to support them.

According to the latest Statistical Report by the Public Library Data Service, among all library systems that serve metro areas of 250,000 to 500,000 in the United States and Canada, only one system—a regional system in Minnesota—operates as many branches as Knox County’s system with as little per-capita expenditure.

Some suggest privately that several of Knox County’s branches exist more as a triumph of community politics than as an answer to a genuine need, perhaps representing a choice of quantity over quality. Branches make it more convenient for the library patron for certain kinds of mainstream requests, but they typically offer only a fraction of the services that a main library can offer. Librarians say the branches are mainly popular conveniences that are meant to supplement, not replace, a main library.

Most branches don’t have reference departments or extensive audio-visual departments. They don’t have stacks with back issues of newspapers and magazines. Periodical collections are limited. The number of book titles they’re able to offer is a small fraction of those a main library can.

“Branches, by their very nature, even the full-service branches, do not have the physical size to be all things to all people,” says Frank. “We have the branches, but those branches have primarily popular material and are geared, mainly, toward children or seniors, specific-subject formats. We cannot begin to duplicate the main library at every branch. The people might want that, but they wouldn’t want to pay for that.”

Some attributes of the main library that can’t be shared with the branches are obvious: the library’s massive collection of old periodicals, for example. Among them are, on microfiche, copies of nearly every daily paper going back into the 1800s. Even the computer services are much better at Lawson McGhee. “We could not begin to afford all the subscription databases we provide at the main library, to provide at every branch,” says Frank. “We just do not have that amount of money.”

The multiple—branch approach isn’t necessarily the most efficient, inexpensive way to run a county library system. Branches already tax the system far more than a more centralized system would. They require a great deal of duplication: 17 sets of each encyclopedia, 17 circulation desks, 17 subscriptions to Time magazine, 17 copiers. Branches are convenient, and though there have been proposals over the years that one or another might be closed, there doesn’t seem to be that sort of ominous talk now. But the same resources invested in a main library could offer many more options to the library patron, for less.

Opposition to library construction is littered with irony. Some librarians admit it would be especially ironic if Knox County’s unusually prolific network of branches doomed prospects for a central library project. What many opponents to the library project don’t know, they say, is that much of what makes the branches so appealing individually is taken care of at the main library downtown. Lawson McGhee houses the library’s largest collection, which is accessible by the couriers who are also based there. Frank is fond of extending the branch metaphor to the main library, the trunk. The trunk, he says, makes the branches what they are.

But the prospect that the branches are so impressive that they obscure the need for the trunk is a frustrating dilemma for librarians.

It may be interesting to consider a handy comparison. Blount County has less than one third the population of Knox County. Blount County is overwhelmingly Republican and also has a reputation of being at least as politically conservative as Knox, perhaps moreso. But Blount County recently built a 93,000 square foot library near downtown Maryville, at a cost of $14 million. Most of the money, $10 million, came from city and county governments, with the largest chunk, $6 million, paid for by Blount County taxpayers. In fact, the average Blount Countian may have paid a little more for the Blount County Library than the average Knox Countian is being asked to pay today.

Blount County Library director Kathy Pagles doesn’t remember that there was any significant controversy about building a new Blount County Library. “People are very supportive of this kind of cultural addition to our community,” says Pagles. “It’s working really well.”

There’s one big difference, though, in that the Blount County Library has no branch locations at all. There’s only the one, and it’s in central Maryville. Without other options, everybody was on board.

The School After Hours

Much of the objection to building a new main library anywhere comes from taxpayers who say, “We should be spending the money on something else.” A recent issue of the News Sentinel contained two interesting pleas for progressive and promising amenities for Knoxville: one columnist called for free Internet access downtown, while a letter writer promoted light rail. But both couched their progressive stands in anti-library rhetoric, implying it would be better to spend the money on something else.

For the largest number of opponents, the “something else” is K-12 education. Knox County Schools have been, for many years, notoriously underfunded. “I probably live in the district that’s most pro-library,” says John Schmid of West Knoxville. “But even they don’t see why we need the new library, in terms of what we need for the schools.”

Frank seems a little flabbergasted by the comparison. “We have hundreds of students, K through 12, who come into the main library and to the branches, every day and every week. It’s thousands and thousands every month. We want to work closely with the school system to meet teachers’ needs and students’ needs because the schools don’t have enough.”

He adds, “The public library is the school after hours,” for both children and adults.

That said, though, he says the school-versus-library issue is doubly frustrating considering that the schools’ budget, adequate or not, is many times greater than the library’s. The Knox County School System currently runs on 63 percent of the total county budget. The whole Knox County Library System, the main library and all the branches, gets only two percent.

Even shutting the whole library system down and redirecting all of its resources to the schools wouldn’t solve all the schools’ funding problems.

Ragsdale notes that he has increased the school budget by $20 million since he came to office. “I want to have a great library system and a great school system,” he says. “This ‘either-or’ is shortsighted. I think we should have both.”

The Library vs. the Internet

There’s a provocative idea, voiced by some county commissioners, that maybe physical libraries belong to the past; people get their information via the Internet these days. Knox County librarians admit that books are circulating a little less than they used to.

The notion that the Internet might outmode or replace the library is one of those aforementioned ironies. Lawson McGhee offers free courses in using the Internet; if more people are using the Internet than the library these days, it may be partly because thousands of Knox Countians have learned how to use computers from downtown librarians. The main library, and the branches, also offer computers for the public to use without charge. Both in the library and through the library’s website, Lawson McGhee offers a wide range of databases, several of which aren’t otherwise available without paying a fee.

Are librarians working to make themselves obsolete?

“Interestingly enough, what we’ve discovered in libraries is that technology has increased usage,” says Frank. “The Internet has increased usage. Librarians, who traditionally are evaluators of knowledge in books, are now evaluators and navigators of knowledge and information found on the Internet. People are overwhelmed with the deluge of information they’re being flooded with every day, and they have to figure out how to sort it out. They come to the library to ask reference librarians, ‘What does this mean? How do I get to this source on the Internet? How do I find my way to get this particular source of knowledge?’ The Internet is not always self-explanatory.” He adds, laughing: “It’s not indexed very well.” He mentions a story going around that some librarians are hard at work trying to index the Internet; he says it’s expected to take at least 50 years.

A June article in the New York Times notes that Google and other search engines are shallow and “notoriously uneven,” and that flesh-and-blood librarians have been called upon to “close the gap between traditional scholarly research and the incomplete, often random results of a Google search.”

In the last few years, a couple of tech-oriented colleges in California studied the prospect of doing without a library; both opted to build them. If there’s a concrete example of the high-tech era’s dedication to the brick-and-mortar library, it might be most conspicuous in Seattle. The home of Microsoft is sometimes regarded as the international headquarters of the high-tech information age—and they just opened, in May, an enormous new publicly funded downtown library—363,000 square feet of floor space, at a cost of $165.5 million. Not surprisingly, it contains more than 400 public computers.

The Wheel Tax for the Library Conundrum

Opposition to the wheel tax has wildly varying sources. A bus driver told us he signed the anti-wheel-tax petition because he’d had a dispute with a sheriff’s deputies and didn’t want the man to get a raise.

However it’s widely believed that the wheel tax is principally for the purpose of building a new central library. If so, it’s hard to find anyone in either county government or on county commission who will ’fess up to it.

Sellers and other opponents are frustrated that the money is not clearly earmarked for specific projects.

“People say, ‘You’re playing cat and mouse with me,’” says Moody. “But I really am not. It’s not as clear-cut as a lot of folks like to think it is.” Affirming that the money would go into the general fund, she discusses the complexities of finance, bond issues and payback schedules. She says it’s very difficult to say with precision what the money will be used for.

“Most people think the wheel tax is just for the library,” says Ragsdale. “I think it’d be fair to say that less than 10 percent of the wheel tax would go to the library. That is, less than $2 million a year. This year, less than $1 million.”

Ragsdale says he means to spread the wheel-tax revenue far and wide. “We’re building new branch libraries in Powell and Burlington. We’re building new schools in Cedar Bluff, Powell and Gibbs. We’re looking into some solution to the West Knox high school problem. We want to be sure that deputies are paid the same as KPD officers. The list goes on and on. It’s also a funding stream for the Veterans Administration nursing home. If it were just for that, I think the wheel tax would be worth it.”

Several of the county commissioners we talked to tend to agree that the library-wheel-tax connection has been exaggerated.

Ragsdale admits, “We should have done a better job of communicating” what the wheel tax was for.

The county mayor feels some urgency about addressing the main-library situation soon. “It would be very inexpensive now, compared to what it was seven or eight years ago,” he says. “If there’s a bump in the interest rate, it will be more expensive.” But he hints that a wheel-tax defeat could necessitate an additional property-tax hike.

Schmid’s a little more straightforward. “Without the wheel tax, we’re going to have to either cut programs or raise the property tax.” A property tax hike isn’t something a petition can stop.

At the heart of all the concern, of course, is cost. One of the frustrations about the current dilemma is that the current Lawson McGhee Library, generally agreed to be a first-rate modernist building in good repair with a few more decades of life expectancy, was planned with expansion in mind, even though it was built when the library served the Knoxville city population only. Architects made plans for a fourth-floor addition; today, a broad stairwell leads up to the ceiling as if it’s another floor. However, changing city codes—“earthquake codes,” according to Bruce McCarty, the architect who designed it—eventually scuttled that possibility. Frank doubts the current structure could even bear the load of a fourth floor by modern-library standards.

Also, the original plot made provisions for expanding the library’s site to Locust Street on the west on land that McCarty recalls was reserved for that purpose. Such a move might easily have allowed for a less-expensive expansion of the current library building on the same site. However, about 15 years ago the site was commandeered to serve the John Duncan Federal Building as a parking area buffered by hedges. McCarty doesn’t know how that happened.

Some librarians from that era say that, although the prospect often came up, the library never had the funds to buy that space. “When you’re working with the political boys, you take what you can get,” recalls one retired librarian. “Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s not.” Eventually, she concedes, “the feds got it.”

The fact that the feds did get it added additional problems to the current main-library site that add to the urgency of finding a new one. After the Oklahoma City bombing, security around federal buildings was increased to a degree unimagined when the buildings were built. The fact that Lawson McGhee Library shares a basement loading area with the Duncan building makes for a potential risk to the federal building. “Of course, we were approached by federal government officials last year who say, you know, you can’t use it anymore,” says Frank. “But we load tons of material every day! So we made an agreement that our guys can be fingerprinted. We’re still using it on a very limited basis for our couriers to pick up and deliver materials; it’s complicated—steel gate and everything else—and it slows down the process a little bit.” Today, the library does more loading and unloading directly from trucks parked in the street.

When and if they leave this library building, Frank says a little slyly, “I think we may have a ready buyer.”

Where they’re going next is, of course, the question.

County officials looked principally at three locations, two on Gay Street: a large parking lot on the west side of Gay between Cumberland and Church, once the prospective site for the federal courthouse that eventually moved into the Whittle building; the other was the site of the old News-Sentinel building at Church and State. It called for a major demolition, but it also offered the possibility of Gay Street frontage. There were questions of whether the historic buildings were impediments to an impressive Gay Street presence; the string of buildings includes some that are believed to date back to the Civil War, making them the oldest storefronts in town. Some are recently renovated, and all are occupied. The county, working with Bullock Smith, focused on that site, with plans to work around the buildings. A preliminary draft of the plan was finished in April.

A third site, the State Street space eyed for a baseball stadium, a justice center, a planetarium, a different sort of baseball stadium, a transit center, and condominiums—but most recently operating as an underused surface parking lot—was also on the table.

The News Sentinel lot remained the principal site until this month. On July 12, County Mayor Mike Ragsdale surprised nearly everyone with the announcement that he intended to combine the library with the federally funded transit center, on State Street. Once intended to save public money for the cinema project, its role is now to save public money for the library project.

Ragsdale believes the change of site and transit-center combination will save more than $20 million, making it a total project of less than $25 million. Coupling a proposal with the elusive transit center project—previously linked to the Gay Street cinema proposal but uncoupled by city mayor Bill Haslam when it appeared it might complicate and slow down the cinema project—seems to some a polite way of dooming an undertaking. It’s uncertain when or even if the federally funded bus station will be built. Haslam-administration director of development Bill Lyons says the bid to the Federal Transit Authority will be done before next June, and is hopeful that groundbreaking could occur in 2005. “We think that the way we’re doing this, from all indications, that this is gonna happen,” he says.

The city would administer the transit center, the county the library part. Lyons admits the city-county collaboration is a “somewhat unusual situation, with city and county entities splitting a project.” But he says the Haslam administration supports it.

The proposal got immediate heaps of ridicule, but none of it came from the office of Larry Frank. “I could work with either site,” he says. “The News Sentinel site had challenges. The first thing I thought about that site was the shadow created by the First Tennessee building [Plaza Tower]—you know, it was overwhelming. Then you had to raze the building, and you wouldn’t know what would be underneath the building in the ground. I still maintain that the connection to Gay Street is essential, whether it’s a bridge, gardens, or however that’s designed.” There’s a gap in the buildings fronting Gay at the intersection with Wall Avenue.

As for the transit-center combination, Frank doesn’t mind that much, either—and it’s clear that he’s thinking big. “I looked at Paris, because the Louvre is over a transit center—many public facilities are, in Paris. Well, the same thing in New York, the same thing in Chicago.” He was concerned about fumes, but learned that the relatively new San Antonio library, built over gas tanks, solved the problem through design.

“And I thought, gee, the transit center provides great access, college students and everyone else, we can bring them right down to the library.” He finds the idea appealing. If parking or driving downtown is the problem, the prospect that all KAT buses would lead to the main library may be one solution.

Wanda Moody and others would like to see still another feature, the long-discussed Discovery Center. It’s a big site.

When he talks about it, Frank sometimes sounds like an urban planner. “If you link to Gay Street, in that location you can link to the Old City. You’ve got the library here, and Summit Hill here, and all of a sudden you’ve got a connection between the Old City and Gay Street here. And you’re beginning to fill out the city. You’re beginning to give it more substance.”

Of all the many ironies of the current main-library dilemma, one of the most surprising concerns Knox County’s changing perceptions of Mike Ragsdale himself. Early last summer, when many library advocates were wary of him, few expected Ragsdale was likely to support the need for a new one.

But this peculiar summer, Ragsdale is the champion of the new library, and under fire from many quarters for it. A few political observers say he seems to be betting his mayoral career on it.

Several proponents on the library side, including Ragsdale himself, admit they haven’t done a good enough job at salesmanship. Currently, Library director Larry Frank says he’s optimistic. But as Commissioner John Schmid assesses the situation, “It can be a tough sell. It’s not a done deal.”

July 29, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 31 © 2004 Metro Pulse