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| Current Leonardtown Library (Old Armory) Deemed Not Renovatable |
Big decision today. Can you bear the suspense? Fate of our County seat may depend on it. County Commissioners will decide the location of the new Leonardtown library and whether it should be placed “downtown” or out on the Hayden property.
Seems like a lot of, as in too much, time and attention has been spent on this matter. Don’t we have more pressing issues? (For instance I heard recently from a reliable source that of the 62 inmates in our County jail, only 4 of them were black and the rest were Caucasians. One of the black inmates said to my source “You either got an assault or a DWI charge on you because you are in good shape. The rest of these scrawny little white boys are all in here because they’re on pills.”)
My first thought was that libraries are no longer needed so why spend $12M on building a new one? However, I’ve done a little noodling around and found a good article here that talks about libraries repositioning themselves as a “third place” for folks to meet, learn, discuss and interact (click here).
Given that perspective then, a library should be as accessible as it can be to as many people as it can accommodate. Seems to me then that the Hayden property is a no brainer of a decision for the new location. Standby though, now that I’ve weighed in, you may want to place your bets on the downtown site as being the one selected by the Commissioners.