Library News

Bring Back My Library

Washington Post: Editorial
Sunday, December 31, 2006; B05

Dear Mayor Fenty:

Help us save the Benning Public Library. We are a motley band of Ward 7 voters and property owners who call ourselves the Emergency Library Committee. Over the past three months, we have hastily organized petitions and protests and hit the streets to "Save Benning" from a very unpopular mixed-use proposal to build housing on the library site. But frankly, we are embarrassed that it took us so long to get fed up with bureaucratic failings and funding mishaps.

In December 2004, the Benning library was padlocked and auctioned off to a dazzling array of Power Point architectural renderings, seven-digit budgets and bureaucratic promises of a state-of-the-art edifice to be completed by December 2006. For the next 730 days, contracts were canceled and millions of dollars escaped into the ether while the almost 20,000 children and more than 50,000 adults of Ward 7 were asked to be patient and endure poor mobile-library service because the interim library scheduled to open in 2005 never materialized.

The current projection is a Benning library by 2009.

There's no overstating how important the library is to our community. For years, Benning librarians filled the gap in many Ward 7 schools where on-site libraries were (and still are) non-functional. Now, a newly minted high school English teacher recalls the horror of discovering that there is no school library and no Benning library: "It's a double whammy, like the kids are being set up to fail." A lively retiree misses the library's easy access for voting and attending book club sessions and special programs. Her restless teenage grandson confesses that he used Benning "to stay out of trouble, meet smart girls and check out the award-winning chess players."

During our Save Benning campaign, a 5-year-old boy asked his daddy, "How do you spell library?" His precocious 10-year-old sister gave him the answer, "l-i-b-r-a-r-y!" and pointed up the hill. "We have one over there. See the big fence around it? Last year I went to the library after school to do my book report, but it was closed. Closed!"

What we need, Mayor Fenty, is the fast-track muscle of your office to support the renovation or reconstruction of Benning library, inviting all Ward 7 residents to contribute ideas for programs and even building design.

The one thing you can do immediately is to make sure that the proposed

$275 million project to build a new central library doesn't upstage the resurrection of our neighborhood libraries.

Mayor Fenty, how do you spell library?

-- Louise V. Gray, chairman, Emergency Library Committee, and Vernard R. Gray, organizer, East of the River Online

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