City is letting library supporters down

COMMENTARY
A decade ago, I was hip-deep in covering a big community push for a new library in Redding. As I reported for the Record Searchlight in 2007, hundreds of tireless fundraisers and volunteers spent years envisioning, planning and conjuring up money for what is now the 56,000-square-foot library at Parkview Avenue and Grape Street near the Redding Civic Center.

In December of 2002, I was in Sacramento when local leaders made their pitch for funds from a state library bond that passed in 2000, and the commission that was distributing the funds turned them away. The leaders went back for the next round of grants in October 2003, buoyed by 542 letters the panel received from Redding advocates. By a 4-2 vote, Redding's proposal won $12.2 million in bond money. Fundraisers by the citizens' group New Library Now made up the lion's share of the difference between that and the library's $20.6 million price tag.

This is all worth remembering and revisiting in light of the library's five-year anniversary, which just passed in February. Because it sometimes seems the city of Redding, which gladly took over the library system from Shasta County and hired a private firm to run it, has a hard time remembering the work that went into that building.

Not long after it opened, problems started to become evident. I blogged about my experience a month after the opening when we visited the library on a weekend and found it strewn with trash. Not long after that, my wife went to the library on a Saturday and had to walk through a obstacle course of kids on skateboards darting in and out between cars, cussing and bragging about how they threatened some other kid's mom that they were going to kick her son's you-know-what if he ever showed up there. Nowadays my wife and I mostly go to the library for the used book sales, which happen on Saturday mornings, and it's not uncommon to see homeless people sleeping on benches in front when we arrive.

Now we come to discover, thanks to the fine work this week of the Searchlight's newest reporter, Jenny Espino, that homeless people like to sleep inside the library, too. They take daytime naps on the couches that the library advocates so proudly showed us when we went on that first walk-through, when the place was sparkling and new. The restrooms are a place for vagrants to wash up, and the front lobby has become a hangout.

The city says it has increased security and it is requiring a library card for people who use the study rooms. That's good. But I had to love the quote from Kim Niemer from the city. "We do not log complaints. We rarely receive them," she told the paper. It sort of reminds me of the clerk at a post office who once told a patron, "We don't have a box for complaints. We get fewer complaints that way."

Look, there's an easy solution to this. Whether you have a home or not, if you're at the library to read or use the facility as it's intended, you're welcome to stay. If you're there to hang out, do drugs, be "boisterous", sleep or have a sink-bath in the men's room, it's time to leave. I'm as compassionate for the homeless as anyone, but the library is not a homeless shelter. We were all sold on the library as a place for families with children. In fact one of the selling points for the current location was that the property next to City Hall and the ballfields was better for families than downtown. We were told this place would have a Barnes and Noble-type atmosphere. You don't see many vagrants sleeping on couches in the bookstore, do you?

Either clean it up, city officials, or don't expect your library to get a lot of patronage from the families that pay your salaries -- or students looking for a place to study. And the next time you come around with hat in hand looking for donations for that next big project, don't be surprised if many in this community tell you, "Sorry. This time I'll pass."