Community Outraged at Possible Randle Library Closure

Randle residents and county officials are mounting a full-throated defense of the Mountain View Library, calling its potential closure the result of a hasty, secretive process by the Timberland Regional Library system that has damaged the public trust.

The first public notice that the library’s fate was in question came at a town hall meeting on Sept. 20 put on by Timberland Regional Library officials at the Randle Fire Hall. TRL oversees 27 libraries in a five-county area, including Mountain View. About 200 residents packed the facility, where they were told that TRL is rethinking the “traditional library model.”

TRL leases Mountain View within the Randle Square building, and that contract expires on Oct. 31. On Wednesday, TRL’s Board of Trustees will meet in Ilwaco, where it is expected to decide whether to sign a new lease or move to a “mobile services” model. What that model would look like has not been clearly defined.

“This is one of our busiest rural libraries,” said Lewis County commissioner Edna Fund, who served for 10 years as a TRL trustee. “We’ve had the closure of schools around there, Packwood, Mineral and Glenoma. We’ve lost mills. We need the community living room in Randle. … And now you want to close that one? What in the world?”

According to Timberland officials, the potential Randle closure is part of the library system’s long-term look at its financial and service needs. Though the system is currently making ends meet, expenditures are on a “trend” to outpace revenues “sometime in the near future.” Randle is the only library in the TRL system that leases its building, and the expiration of the lease comes with that financial reality in mind.

But Timberland says the potential shift isn’t just about cost-cutting, citing figures that its libraries only reach about 10 percent of residents systemwide.

“It is both a financial issue and trying to reach more people issue,” said Library Director Cheryl Heywood.

District Manager Trisha Cronin, who presided over the town hall last week, assured residents that the closure of Mountain View would not mean an end of Timberland’s presence in Randle.

“If we were to recommend that we do not extend the lease, the library staff you know and love will still be here,” Cronin said. “What a library looks like in 21st Century … might look a little different, but that does not mean we’re going away.”

Despite that, Timberland has not provided many specifics on what an alternate plan would look like or how it would reach more people. Heywood said it could include more community programming in other buildings, outreach to the school or “some kind of truck” — perhaps with a screen to show movies.

“I’m not going to say, ‘This is it — what we’re looking at,’” she said. “There’s just a lot of variety.”

With those details still unclear, everyone from county officials to local residents to the library building’s owner to a former TRL board president has expressed concern at the process that has brought Mountain View to the brink.

“I was very surprised by it. There’s a need for more libraries, not less,” said Gene Weaver, a Rochester resident and past member of the Timberland board of trustees. “I certainly think there should be more notice to a community, and maybe some options presented.”

Cynthia Berne, who owns the building that houses the library, said she reached out to Timberland in July to begin renegotiating the lease, but didn’t hear back for five weeks, at which point she was told TRL was considering closing the library. She said she has owned the building for 12 years, usually handling the library lease in 3- or 5-year increments. The current lease is for $1,470 a month, and she offered to extend it for just one year at $1,500 a month if the library needed time to figure out its long-term plan.

“They haven’t discussed anything,” Berne said in an interview. “I’m actually appalled by the lack of community awareness. None of us knew the library was doing this. It was very flippant the way it was presented.”

Berne and her husband Craig, Seattle residents, sent a letter to be read at the town hall after rumors swirled that the lease was to blame for a potential closure. She said she did not want residents to believe that a dire new financial circumstance had created Timberland’s position.

“We strongly encourage the Library System Board to take a more holistic approach to resolving their System’s financial challenges rather than closing one of the outlying area Libraries, where it is most needed in the community,” they wrote.

Timberland’s 2018 budget lists $18,655 for “operating rentals” at Mountain View, within $1,000 of what Berne claims as the lease total. Mountain View’s total expenditures are listed at $137,000, more than $100,000 of which is staff salaries and benefits. Only two libraries in the Timberland system pay less in staff expenses.

Overall, the Timberland system’s revenues and expenditures for 2018 both come in at around $23 million, making Mountain View about half of one percent of the system’s budget. More than 90 percent of Timberland’s revenues come from property taxes.

According to county commissioner Gary Stamper, who represents the rural East County district that includes Randle, closing one of the system’s smallest libraries is antithetical to the mission of Timberland, which was founded 50 years ago in part to “provide service for the first time in several rural communities.”

“The whole thing behind Timberland Library — it was established for rural areas,” he said. “That’s why they call it the Timber. Land. Regional. Library.”

Stamper attended the town hall last week, and said he too had been mostly in the dark about TRL’s ideas, even though Lewis County commissioners have appointed two of the seven members of Timberland’s board of trustees.

“There was no transparency, because people had just heard about it,” he said. “They were frustrated with that. Someone asked me and I said, ‘We just heard about it too.’ … They were frustrated, and rightfully so.”

One of Lewis County’s Timberland trustees, Hal Blanton, said he hasn’t decided how he will vote on the potential shuttering of the library.

“We’re committed to bring services to Randle, to Mountain View,” he said. “What it might look like, there’s a lot of different things.”

On Wednesday, Blanton and the full Timberland board will hear recommendations from the board’s Facilities Committee on how to proceed. Both Blanton and Heywood said the board’s decision will be shaped by those recommendations, and claimed to not know what they will be. The Facilities Committee last met on Aug. 16, and the full board held a retreat Saturday. Still, they say the decision is anyone’s guess until after the Wednesday presentation from the committee.

“There’s a lot of moving parts to it,” Blanton said.

Lewis County resident Brian Zylstra is president of Timberland’s board and sits on the Facilities Committee.

“The Facilities Committee has a recommendation for the full board of trustees,” Zylstra said. “ I’m not at liberty to say what the recommendation is.”

Zylstra did say that board members “totally got the message” that Randle residents want to keep their library.

Both Zylstra and Blanton attended the town hall meeting at the Randle Fire Hall.

Most of the residents who spoke at the town hall last week emphasized the importance of the facility to the community, saying it was more essential than most because of Randle’s small size. The Chronicle viewed the town hall through a video that was shared on Facebook.

“These people really depend on the library,” said a woman who identified herself only as a caregiver for Catholic Community Services. “This is the hub of our community. We don’t have community centers. We don’t have a senior center. We don’t have any place for the children to go. There’s some children that don’t have a safe place to be. … This is all we have. A bookmobile is not going help people.”

Randle resident Steve Hoecker, who called The Chronicle to bring up the issue, said the community’s support for the library was evident at the meeting. He said the timing of the proposal was suspect, and if the building lease was really the issue, the community could have solved it had it been given more notice.

“Lots of people people said, ‘Give us a year. We’ll come up with a building,’” he said. “It’s not just about the money. … There was so much negative emotion in the crowd, because everybody felt they didn’t include us or involve us.”

Asked about the timing, Zylstra said that frustration had been voiced to him.

“It’s important to let folks know as soon as you can about that so they can weigh in publicly,” he said.

Commissioners noted the importance of the library’s wireless Internet connection in an area where connectivity is hard to find.

“People come in and read the newspaper,” Fund said. “People come when the library’s closed and they get on the Internet. In Randle, they have poor internet and they can only get it at the library. There’s no other hotspots. Zero. … I want to see, what is it — this magic bullet that’s going to provide the services that people are seeing in Randle right now.”

Added Stamper: “Bookmobiles, their course was exited many years ago because of the services now that the library provides.”

Timberland officials said the term “bookmobile” was one used by residents, not TRL. Heywood said the preferred term is “mobile services.”

“It’s much more than the bookmobile of days past,” said Timberland Communications Manager Jeff Kleingartner.

All parties praised the efforts of Mountain View Library Manager Mary Prophit, who has organized a wide array of programming and partnerships, both within the library and the community.

Fund said she had suggested moving the Wednesday board meeting to decide Mountain View’s fate to the Twin Cities area instead of Ilwaco, which is nearly a three-hour drive from Randle. Heywood and Blanton said it was probably too late to change the location, which was determined nearly a year in advance.

“Ilwaco’s about as far away from Randle as you can get,” Blanton said. “The optics don’t look good. That’s just how it is.”

Whether or not many Randle residents can make the trip, Timberland says their voices have been heard.

“We really appreciated how so many people took the time to come out and speak to us,” Heywood said. “We definitely appreciated their passion for their library firsthand. We have received a lot of letters from people in the Randle area that are being shared with the trustees.”

A Facebook event for the upcoming trustee meeting is filled with comments pleading to keep Mountain View’s doors open. A video of the town hall in Randle is approaching 900 views. A post from Prophit thanking the community for supporting the library has nearly 200 likes and dozens of supportive comments.

Still, Heywood said the strong support at the town hall doesn’t mean the community as a whole believes the library should be kept open.

“I know there were about 200 people there, but that doesn’t represent everybody who lives out there,” she said. “Is that everybody who lives out there? I don’t think so.”

She did not elaborate on whether a silent majority of Randle residents support the library’s closure.

Correction: A previous version of this story identified Gene Weaver as the former Timberland Regional Library board president. Weaver was a board member, but never served as president.