Residents Decry Board Vote to Close Gwinnett County Branch
An August 11 vote to close the three-year-old Dacula branch of the Gwinnett County (Ga.) Public Library at year’s end and shift some of the staff to the future Hamilton Mill Library has raised such ire in the burgeoning county some 70 miles outside Atlanta that trustees agreed several days later to reconsider their 3–1 vote at their September 22 meeting.
GCPL Executive Director Nancy Stanbery-Kellam explained August 13 in a open letter that “the unexpected severe decline in the county’s revenue” had made it impossible for officials to stock and staff the Hamilton Mill facility once it was completed in December. She said that trustees decided to draw on the resources of the Dacula branch, located seven miles from the Hamilton Mill site, since the facilities are identical in size, and to repurpose Dacula to “provide badly needed space for other library activities that support the entire county” such as a location for stocking retrospective fiction, local history resources, and a site for facilitating interlibrary loan. Stanbery-Kellam also said that GCPL favored Hamilton Mill’s opening because the stipulations of a $2-million state grant “could be in jeopardy if the building is not fully operational within a designated time frame.”
However, a growing number of Dacula area residents were soon taking exception to the announced closure. Within a day of the board meeting, a Save the Dacula Library Facebook group was established that, as of August 26 at midday, had 4,988 determined members. Among the ironies pointed out among posters is that the Dacula branch is situated between three schools, the public pool, and the fire station, “smack dab in the middle of everything,” as area Betsy L. McGuire wrote in an August 17 Gwinnett Daily Post op-ed titled “Dacula: A Community Punished for Its Success.”
The Dacula Business Association decided August 18 to retain an attorney to pursue the matter through the courts if trustees do not rescind the decision. “My disappointment with the board was that we tried to rush through this issue in a manner that I think is less than professional,” said Dacula Mayor Jimmy Wilbanks, who joined town business leaders at the DBA meeting, according to the August 19 Gwinnett Daily Post. Library trustee Phillip Saxton, who cast the lone dissenting vote at the GCPL board meeting, agreed with Wilbanks, telling the newspaper that he wanted both the Dacula and Hamilton Mill branches open “to serve our respective communities.”
Also disagreeing with the decision was Gwinnett County Commission member Kevin Kenerly, who reminded the library board in an August 17 letter that library and county staffers had worked to ensure that GCPL’s branches were situated to serve evolving population patterns and travel times “because library buildings should be long-term investments.” Other dissenters may well take up Kenerly’s line of reasoning in January, when the library board plans to announce the closure of two more branches “if the County Commissioners vote on their CY2010 budget in January in its current configuration,” according to GCPL Executive Director Stanbery-Kellam.
Save the Dacula Library has slated a rally for September 19 in support of the branch.
—Beverly Goldberg, American Libraries Online Posted on August 26, 2009.