By Daniel Pye<br><a href="mailto:pyed@gnnewspaper.com">E-mail Dan</a>
Even though the town’s library board has scaled back its plan for a new library campus, recently published comments from the group’s chairman have Kenmore residents uneasy.
Lisa Azzarelli-Brown was the first to point at the comments at Monday’s Town Board meeting. In the most recent edition of the Ken-Ton Bee, Chairman David Dietz was quoted saying the new library north of Sheridan Drive would ideally be the only one in the town.
Azzarelli-Brown said this was a shock, since she understood that the plan for a single library had been altered to keep Kenmore open. Later in the article, Dietz is quoted further to say that Kenmore’s library branch will remain open, but a handful of readers were left wondering which statement was accurate.
“It seems difficult to trust the library board given the contradictory statements that appear on a month-to-month basis,” Azzarelli-Brown said.
Resistance to the central library philosophy materialized more than a year ago, when fliers and meetings organized by the library board designed to tout the advantages of a new library raised questions about what would happen to the village branch. Since then, the board has stepped back from the 35,000 square foot plan in favor of a smaller 20,000 design.
That new facility — to be located north of Sheridan Drive — is something that Councilman Joseph Emminger said fits the bill of a neighborhood library.
“Obviously that cannot be a central library at that size,” he said.
Councilwoman Lisa Chimera, who chairs the Town Board’s library committee, said the town specifically requested that Kenmore’s library be left open in planning for the future.
In his late January presentation, Dietz told town leaders that the Kenmore branch was untouchable and that the survey the board recently undertook factored that branch’s continued existence into the questions. Moreover, the board has applied for grants that require the branch to stay open for at least another decade.
But Katie Burd, the Kenmore resident who organized much of the outcry that led to the library board reconsidering its central library plan, said the numbers don’t add up to a favorable outlook for her neighborhood’s library. Of the $960,000 in funding the town’s two libraries currently receive from the county and state, $789,000 of that goes to Kenmore’s branch. If the town closes the Kenilworth branch in favor of a new, state-of-the-art facility, Burd said she finds it unlikely that her library will be able to maintain the type of services it now provides.
“With that pot of money, how do we staff the new, 20,000 square foot library?” Burd asked.
Contact reporter Daniel Pye at 693-1000, ext. 158.
