Sewell Mill Library and Cultural Center

I went to the East Cobb Library Saturday, and it was PACKED! With people of all ages, and from all walks of life. Yes, the weather was dreary, and yes, the few weekend hours it’s open certainly had a lot to do with the turnout.

We all know this, given how the East Cobb branch is the second-busiest in the Cobb County Public Library System. I read a few newspapers and magazines, browsed the bookshelves and did some research for this piece.

At times I wondered if all this might go away in a few months, this corner of the Parkaire Landing Shopping Center, given how the East Cobb Library is on a list of proposed closures.

I was afraid of getting too sentimental, since I grew up in East Cobb (and have written previously about my neighborhood branch, the late, great East Marietta Library).

I’ll admit I’m a bleeding heart for libraries, and this week some really bad emotions came flooding back when I saw not just the East Cobb branch on the hit list (as was suggested last year by commissioner JoAnn Birrell), and several others. Nearly half of all the county branches. A quarter of the operating budget may be slashed, and nearly half of the current operating hours.

For the second time in seven years, local elected officials are playing Cobb library politics, and this time I fear the results could be worse. In 2011, then-commission chairman Tim Lee threatened to shut down 13 of the 17 branches.

The county was in the midst of a budget crisis due to the recession, and his ploy worked. No branches were closed, but hours were cut back. Library patrons kicked up a fuss, and property taxes were raised.

As a citizen, I took a dim view of Lee’s tactics. Those of us who ardently support libraries were played, like a cheap fiddle, even though none of our branches were closed. We felt we had won a battle, but looking back, there was a larger war over our emotions that we may have conceded, and possibly for good.

As a ballyard sage famously put it, it’s déjà vu all over again. Lee’s successor, Mike Boyce, has learned very quickly in his first year in office that nobody wants their property taxes raised. He couldn’t get a 0.13-mills rate increase last year to fully fund the 2008 parks bond referendum that was part of his campaign.

For the last month or so, he’s been toting budget boards to speaking events around the county, with pie charts and lists and all kinds of dollar signs, illustrating a projected fiscal year 2019 deficit of at least $30 million.

It’s likely to be much higher, and he’s trying to get ahead of the process by repeating this message months ahead of time, preparing Cobb citizens for the worst, what he’s called “the painful truth.” Others think he’s pandering to their emotions to get a tax increase.

At a town hall meeting last month at the East Cobb Senior Center, he told seniors angry about fee increases and the imposition of a membership fee that “we’re all in this together.” Some of them groaned, but he understood the power they wield.

“You all vote,” he said. On the other hand, library patrons “may not all be voters, but if you close their libraries, they will become voters.”

There were some chuckles around the room. This was just a few weeks after the commissioners held their budget retreat, and instructed department heads to look for steep budget cuts.

This week, the library list was the first to be revealed, and nobody is laughing. These proposed cuts have stirred the emotions of library advocates, right on cue. Tuesday’s commissioners meeting will include a public comment session that figures to be the first of many occasions in which they will get an earful from citizens about libraries.

This round of Cobb library politics is complicated by two other major factors that weren’t there in 2011: the Atlanta Braves stadium, and a property tax rollback two years ago.

Boyce and East Cobb commissioner Bob Ott have been making a point recently that the $8.6 million Cobb pays annually for the bond issue to build SunTrust Park may pay off for itself this year.

However, that vote—made in haste in late 2013 following a sham of a process that lacked transparency and accountability—reflects what many, myself included, still believe to be misplaced priorities.

Ott and Birrell, East Cobb’s other commissioner, voted for the millage rollback in 2016 at the behest of Lee, right before Boyce trounced him in a runoff. Those decisions cannot be undone, but they certainly have contributed to Cobb’s financial state today.

We starve libraries in Cobb, and have for years. It’s ridiculous that I can’t go to my new neighborhood branch, the fantastic Sewell Mill Library and Cultural Center, before 1 p.m. on a Saturday.

Never on a Sunday is any Cobb library branch open, except the main Switzer branch, but that’s only during the school year.

Braves stadium funding, by the way, is on the “must” list. That item, with a 30-year contract, moved to the head of the line of priorities. Libraries, must settle, as usual, for scraps, if there are any at all to have.

The public library system has a short history in Cobb. Until 1957, libraries were operated only in cities, by municipal governments in Marietta, Powder Springs and Austell. Then the Cobb-Marietta system was born, prodded by Dennis Kemp, a former library board chairman from West Cobb concerned that there were no library services for citizens in unincorporated Cobb.

The county would soon rapidly transform from farmland to suburbia. The first countywide library bond issue was in 1965, and the library system became part of Cobb County government in the 1970s.

I discovered this information in a book about the history of Cobb County by Thomas Allan Scott, a historian at Kennesaw State University. It was published in 2003 by the Cobb Landmarks and Historical Society, and it’s available in every Cobb library branch.

I may not have known this without spending a lot of time in library branches here in East Cobb. Sure, you can buy that book on Amazon, and do a lot of things online, and on your phone, that libraries still haven’t quite grasped. A book I checked out Saturday at the East Cobb Library, “BiblioTech,” argues eloquently that libraries are as vital today as ever, but they need to get their digital act together.

It’s hard to do that if you don’t have the resources, and political support when it matters the most. Sadly, libraries pop up on the Cobb political radar only when they’re threatened.

The forward-thinking Sewell Mill branch was approved via SPLOST and partially funded by the state. Weeks before opening, commissioners acted in seat-of-the-pants fashion to fund new staff positions that were known about for months.

On the list of proposed library closures revealed this week is the Kemp Memorial Library, named after Dennis Kemp. Another is the Sibley library on South Cobb Drive, named after Frances Weldon Sibley, the first licensed librarian in Cobb County, who started her 30-year-plus tenure in that role in the 1930s.

They were visionaries, well ahead of their time, who believed in the common good of libraries long before they became the third-rail political issue of today.

Whatever you think about tax increases, and the SPLOST process, it’s a shame their names could vanish into history, as well as the East Cobb Library, because elected officials might end up doing more this year than simply playing to your emotions. And mine.

 

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