The divisive antagonisms about Sartell’s proposed community center and library are a disconcerting shame, and the lack of communications that led to them are all but inexcusable.
When the council voted 3-2 to choose the southern (Town Square) site for the center, many Sartell residents – preferring a more central site – began to complain. Of course the finger-pointing rumor-mill whirled into a tempest, including an unfair, illogical assertion that council member Pat Lynch and his company, a transportation brokerage firm in Town Square, would benefit financially from the chosen site.
The city’s hired consultant, Strack Construction Co. of Sartell, scrutinized the five potential community-center sites and presented to the council the pluses and minuses of each. For better or worse, three of the five council members (Lynch, Steven Hennes, Mayor Sarah Jane Nicoll) voted for the southern site, and they gave reasonable, positive, sincere reasons why they favored that site.
But within a matter of weeks, clouds of contention gathered, and two regrettable facts, that few if any predicted, suddenly became obvious.
One: The Great River Regional Library system, upon which a workable Sartell library is dependent, will not accept the southern site, which is too close to the St. Cloud and Waite Park libraries’ service area.
Two: GRRL requires 12,500-square feet of space for a branch library in Sartell, no matter whether it’s part of a community center or as a stand-alone structure somewhere else. The Sartell council and others never expected to build a branch library of that size. It would be too expensive, on top of the nearly $500,000 the city might be expected to spend for a start-up collection of library items, as the GRRL expects.
There is no point in playing a blame game at this point. Yes, all things considered, it would be grand to have a community center with a library smack dab in the middle of the city. But that wish will not change the fact that, as things look now, Sartell will not get the branch library its residents had hoped for and voted for (half-cent sales tax) for years.
What is really disappointing, however, is the apparent lack of communication among the City of Sartell, city consultants and GRRL. Why didn’t they all get together to find out precisely GRRL requirements for a branch library? Why that wasn’t done is hard to understand. And GRRL should have communicated to Sartell precisely what it would require to make a library possible before the council made its site decision. On both sides, it seems to have been poor communication.
Let’s try to be hopeful. Perhaps a compromise is possible from GRRL. It has stressed “flexibility” as one of the hallmarks of a “library of the future,” which GRRL was hoping could be built in Sartell. Will that “flexibility” include a willingness to shrink the minimum space by half or less? Even so, there is another sad fact that looms: GRRL will not accept the southern site for any size of library; will it compromise on that, too? Building a library elsewhere (say, at city hall) would be prohibitively expensive, according to consultants.
So what does that leave? Will the library so many Sartell residents dreamed about be some kind of re-purposed “reading room” stocked with donated items? Some library! Not exactly what residents had in mind.
As things now stand, the community center, at its southern site, is almost certainly to become a recreation center minus a bona-fide branch library. There is no excuse for such an outcome; it would be a slap in the face to those who voted for a half-cent sales tax on the basis it would fund a library.
A bold turn-about solution would be for the council to go back to the drawing board and decide to build a stand-alone GRRL-supported library in a central location. A library acceptable to the GRRL might be built by cutting back on recreational amenities in the south-based community center (say, one gym instead of three) and then add more recreation facilities in the future at the community-center site. OR those who voted for a south site could change their minds, put the community center in more of a central location, put a library in it built to GRRL requirements and make it affordable by cutting back on recreational facilities that could be added in future. But that outcome, even if it’s somehow feasible and affordable, probably won’t happen until a critical mass of Sartell residents demand it. They should demand it.