A Longmont City Council member, Tuesday night, praised the arrival of a state $22,893 grant for the Longmont Library for children’s reading material but said the funds falls woefully short of what the facility needs to prosper.
“It’s nice but it’s not enough for our library,” Councilmember Polly Christensen said, after the council accepted the grant. “Our library is underfunded even for Colorado … Everybody loves libraries but we ignore them when it comes to the budget.”
Consultants hired by the city told the city council last year the library is too small to serve a city as big as Longmont and its digital holdings lag. The consultants also said the library needs an infusion of funding to supplement whathelp it gets from the nonprofit Friends of the Longmont Library, which funds nearly all of its programs.
The library, located at 409 Fourth Ave., is about 51,000 square feet and was built for a population of up to 68,000, Karen Roney, Longmon’s community services director, told the Leader last year. Using multiple formulas, the consultants estimate the library should be in the 80,000-to-85,000-square-foot range, and in the 95,000-to-1000,000-square foot range as Longmont continues to grow, Roney said.
Christensen told the council the creation of a library district has been suggested as a way to properly fund the facility. But, she said, “why don’t we fund (the library) in the first place. We just ignore them and tell everybody how much we love (libraries).
The $22,893 comes from the Colorado Department of Education, Colorado State Library system as part of the State Grants for Libraries Act, a city staff report states. The grant is for educational materials to improve literacy and learning.
“The Longmont Public Library will use these funds to purchase online databases and children’s electronic books and materials,” the staff report states.
