In this day and age when hard-copy printed media is disappearing, the Dayton Daily News shares an article about investing $64M for a new downtown library. The story is subtitled “What taxpayers are getting for their money.” While the facilities are likely very nice, you have to question this amount of investment in brick & mortar to enable ‘book browsing’ (Bear in mind that there was another $100M spent to build other new libraries around the county). I would be willing to wager that it is not the best expenditure of funds, especially in light of underfunded areas such as pensions for county workers. How long will we have to wait until they come back to the citizens of Montgomery County for more money? It’s inevitable.
Because it has four times the public space as the old library, the new building will be able to put all 200,000 of its circulation books and other media on the shelves whereas previously much of it was stored. This means more books to browse…
In 2012, voters approved a $187 million bond issue to pay for library renovations…
The Dayton Metro Library last passed an operating levy in 2009 and has an operating budget of around $30 million. Kambitsch said the library may need to revisit that at some point, but there are currently no plans to go back to the voters.