The Pierce County Public Library lives to see another day — for now.
Due to the forward thinking and publicminded spirit of Pierce’s county commission and the organizational efforts of the Interim Director of Three Rivers Library System, a perilous funding shortfall has been avoided. Our library will remain open, the caring and dedicated staff will keep their jobs and the many and wonderful programs and events hosted at the library will continue.
This is a victory for all those who love the library and what it represents, but it is important no one ever forgets just who it was that willingly brought our local library to edge of ruin. Painful as it is to say, the blame belongs to the hard-hearted political grandstanding of our own Board of Education. Their refusal to pay what was owed nearly left us as the only one of Georgia's 159 counties without a public library. What a laughingstock we would have become, but they would not be moved.
In days past, the library was funded by the pooled resources of four different partners: Pierce County, the City of Blackshear, the Pierce Board of Education and the State of Georgia. So long as the first three local partners paid their promised share, the library qualified for state funds and support.
Should any one of those three local partners default on their obligation, they put not just the Pierce library at risk but also every other library in the system of which it was a member. The reason for this is because when one library defaults on their funding, they endanger the state support of all the libraries in their regional system. Possibly even worse than being a laughingstock, this would have opened Pierce up to legal action from the other members who had paid their dues.
It is important that every taxpayer and voter in Pierce County understand just what was at risk. If the library did not meet its share of the required funding, the state would then not disburse its own share of funds. Once that happened, the library would have been forced to reduce its hours of operation to a recommended two days a week or go begging to the other members of its regional system.
Those in a position to know have said that they are unaware of any library currently subsidized by other counties in their region, which means our library would have been compelled to go to two days a week. When that happens it is no longer considered a library by the state of Georgia. It becomes what is called a service outlet. That would have been something for Pierce to be proud of, wouldn't it? No library, but a two-daya- week service outlet!
And why exactly did the BOE decide we didn’t need a public library? Because by refusing to pay their share, that was the message they sent to everyone in Pierce County. The answer is no one really knows. The BOE has been conspicuously evasive and closedmouthed about their bewildering decision. Odds are good, it is due to the sound and fury surrounding events at the Ware County Public Library over the last two years.
Bickering over the placement of pride flags and the symbols above certain figures in a mural devoted to inclusivity devolved into fruitless and ultimately unprovable accusations that people weren't using the correct bathrooms. Yet, instead of leaving Ware County to resolve its own issues, (which it ultimately did, though to no one's real satisfaction) certain parties in Pierce County seem to have let those hot-button issues affect their decision making.
Supposedly, all the BOE wanted was to no longer be involved in the drama of neighboring Ware County. All our library had to do was move to the Three Rivers Regional System based in Jesup. By dangling the carrot of withheld funding just out of reach, the BOE forced our library to leave the embattled Okefenokee Regional Library System of which Ware was part and join Three Rivers instead, but once the move was accomplished the BOE still refused to pay their customary share. How strange and reckless that they would play political chicken with our own library's funding even after they got what they claimed to have wanted.
What could possibly inspire such pettiness? A few lame excuses have been trotted out; mumblings about “objectionable material” at the local library, as if there isn’t potentially objectionable material on the shelves of the libraries in the county schools, and that school libraries somehow make our public library redundant, as if parents that homeschool their children (and still pay tax dollars toward public schools) don’t utilize the public library’s resources and programs.
Which doesn’t even touch upon the fact that education isn’t something exclusive to children or somehow ends at high school.
For shame, BOE members, for shame. It is the lot of those in public office that they must often work with people they don’t like and compromise in order to make things work—not to offer false solutions and then break things further once good faith efforts have been made to put those solutions in place.
Perhaps those responsible for a near disaster hope all this will blow over and be forgotten now that the crisis has been averted. More than ever, it needs to be remembered for the bad governance it was, and especially when the time comes to vote for new BOE representation.
