Last week, I spent some time exploring the situation our local libraries are in and how we got here. This week, I’d like to continue the discussion by looking at some of the benefits a strong library system brings to our community — in other words, what we risk losing if the millage ultimately fails and the library loses the 38% of its budget those tax dollars represent.

I’ll put a nice long list of amenities the Lafayette Public Library provides towards the end of the post, but I’d like to start with something more personal. 

We’ve been homeschooling for roughly eight years now, and I can say with conviction that our homeschool could not function as it does — almost could not exist — without the public library. 

Last week when I took stock, we had over $1,000 worth of library materials (books and audiobooks) in our home. A good portion of those are “for fun” reading (which some of us call “building fluency”) but a good portion are also dedicated to learning new information. I recently returned a stack of books on Egypt. This year our assigned (library sourced) reading has also included a children’s version of Gilgamesh, Old Yeller, The Cricket in Times Square, books on ancient Mesopotamia and how energy works…the list goes on, and it’s barely November.

The point is, my husband is a school teacher, with a school teacher’s salary. I don’t really get paid to write. There is no way we could give our children the education they currently enjoy without our libraries, and we are grateful. We could be paying hundreds of dollars for the use of these “curriculum materials,” and it would still be a great deal. For the upcoming millage, we pay roughly $11. I couldn’t purchase any one of the books about Egypt for that price.

(There is a greater good here, as well — libraries are key to a strong democracy. Because they give everyone, regardless of their ability to pay, access to information, they lay the groundwork for an educated and involved public. This isn’t my idea — it was Ben Franklin’s. But to get back to our story…)

When we first moved to Acadiana, we lived in the wild Cajun prairie between Grand Coteau and Arnaudville. We soon learned that, despite our St. Landry Parish address, we could get a Lafayette Public Library card. The Sunset Community Library (St. Landry) was closer, but North Regional Library in Carencro was on the way to most of the places we went…and it had story time. Mrs. Anna, the children’s librarian, was pretty much my kids’ first friend in Acadiana. Every week I got four small children out of the trailer and into the magic of books, songs, sidewalk chalk, bubbles, and exploring the library. We didn’t have internet at home, so it was also my only computer time, and my only access to a printer. It’s hard to express what the library meant to us that year, but one word might sum it up: connection.

Again, once the library re-opened for drive-thru services after quarantine, it was one of the few options for entertainment at that time. I’d order books online (we did have internet by then, thankfully) and pick them up at the window, along with take-home crafts for the kids. We also, appropriately, borrowed the board game “Pandemic.” The librarians provided online story times and events to help parents cope and our community stay connected.

Which brings me to the promised long list of library services we risk losing if we don’t care for our libraries. There are the obvious things that can be checked out: books, music, movies, video games, board games, air quality monitors, musical instruments. Plus all the digital resources — magazines, books, newspapers, genealogy information, and research databases. And if our library doesn’t have a book, they will go out of their way to get it. Need an obscure book on life in Roman-occupied Israel? That’s what interlibrary loan is for.

There are the spaces open to all: meeting and study rooms available for reservation, a quiet place in a world that is noisy, a warm place in winter and a cool place in summer, a place where one is allowed to loiter in a world where people are often only welcome if they plan to spend money. Our churches are usually locked these days, but the library still provides a seat and a little rest for those with no where else to go.

There are the services: tax and legal and resume assistance programs, nutrition and exercise programs (some day I will make it to the Zumba class), literacy programs for children and adults, craft time and story time and speakers on all sorts of topics. My oldest two girls and I heard Ernest Gaines speak at our library a couple of years ago. When Lucy read A Lesson Before Dying in English this fall, she already had a connection to the author. That is priceless.

There is the equipment: access to computers, internet, and printers. In the Maker Spaces patrons can use sewing machines, sergers, 3-D printers, dye-cut machines, typewriters, and more.

And there is the community a library creates. Moms meet at story time and then schedule their own play dates. People meet at craft events and become friends; people meet at book clubs and learn from each other. 

If all this isn’t enough, libraries also mean good jobs and higher property values. Even if you never set foot in the library, you still benefit.

Some people in our community argue that these resources aren’t worth our tax dollars. I disagree. I think we should be hesitant to undervalue community, literacy, and an educated populace. As Catholics, we believe we have an obligation to develop the whole person towards holiness; our public libraries (rightly used, of course, but that is another very long post!) make the space and the resources available for people to do just that. If our goal is human flourishing, libraries are a step in the right direction.

All that said, the discussion circles around and ends where it began for me. For our family, the library, more than anything else, means books. Books mean stories. Stories are where we meet people like us, people unlike us, and ourselves. I believe in stories because I believe in the Word, and I believe one place in which we can encounter Him is in stories. So join me at the polls this coming Saturday, November 13, please, and support our community’s access to these stories.

I think everyone who knows us knows one thing about us: our family loves books. The bookshelves line the walls to the point that there’s no room to hang art. There are stacks by everyone’s desk, on everyone’s nightstand, and (often) in the van. Naturally, something else comes with our love of books: a love for our public library.

The Lafayette Public Library is at an inflection point. One of its two millages is on the ballot November 13 – a millage that represents 38% of the library system’s annual operating revenue. Normally, this kind of millage renewal is almost a given. The same sort of property tax is used to fund police, firefighters, parks, drainage, and other civil services. But in 2018, Lafayette learned that public support for libraries could not be taken for granted.

In 2018, a new PAC was formed – Citizens for a New Louisiana. The PAC spent upwards of $20,000, including a direct mailing to Lafayette Parish residents, arguing that the library system had too much money in reserve to need this millage renewal.

The voters agreed — at least, roughly 650 more voters agreed than disagreed, in an election that had only 8% voter turnout. The result was a $3.6 million budget cut for the libraries. 

If that weren’t enough, voters also pulled $10 million from the library’s reserve funds and rededicated it to drainage and parks. Then property values dropped in 2020, delivering another hit to the library’s budget. The Parish council voted to adjust a remaining millage to make up for the short fall, since the library has not been receiving the full 2 mills the voters awarded them in the first place, but Mayor-President Josh Guillory vetoed the proposal.

All of which means that the November 13 millage vote is truly make-or-break for our libraries.

Geoff Daily has a very clear run-down of the implications over at The Current, so I won’t go into all the details. But the important thing to know is that if this millage fails, some of our libraries will close. $4 million are on the line, and there is absolutely no way to save $4 million by cutting corners here and there. There are a couple of possible scenarios floating out there, but if you visit any branch other than Main, your favorite library is in danger.

This situation is especially depressing because of the steps Lafayette has taken to build its library system over the past twenty years. With the 2019 opening of West Regional Library in Scott, the city completed a project voters approved twenty years ago to renovate Main and build four regional libraries. Our system, in fact, was awarded the James O. Modisette Award for Public Libraries in 2020, recognizing the improvements made in the libraries’ service to the community. That’s the highest honor the Louisiana Library Association can give to a public library system. 

It would be a shame to throw away the work of the past two decades, work that has made Lafayette Public Libraries one of the premier systems in the state, because the citizens of Lafayette don’t want to contribute $20 per year per household.

Wait – what? You can see for yourself. The Library has set up a calculator to estimate how much property tax a household will pay for this millage. 

Our family pays $11.96 a year. Less than $2 a person.

To put that in perspective, one picture book costs roughly $17 these days. I gathered up all the library books in our house (that I could find – you know how that is!) and added up the total. We have $1,011 worth of library materials in our home at this moment. And since that’s not counting computer and printer access, programming, digital checkouts, take-home crafts, and use of the space (a couple of hours a month, at least), and assistance from librarians, I think we’re getting our money’s worth.

There are many more reasons you should vote to fund our libraries…but I don’t want to try my dear readers’ patience with a longer blog post. So I plan to finish this conversation next week. If you don’t already love your library enough to make you put up some home-made “Save Our Libraries” yard signs, hopefully next week’s post will convince you that you should.

This NPR story has been on my mind this week:

Known For Its Floods, Louisiana Is Running Dangerously Short Of Groundwater

Louisiana has a lot of problems – rampant industrial pollution, abysmal rates of poverty and chronic health problems, bottom-of-the barrel education, to name a few – but I, like many others, didn’t think that a scarcity of drinkable water was one of them.

Yet it’s true: between industry, farming, and lawn-watering, we are pulling water out of our aquifers faster than they can be refilled. Which is disconcerting, to say the least.

For what it’s worth, our family has been on the edge of the Conserve Our Water bandwagon for a while, with things like rain barrels and infrequent toilet flushing. I did the math, and the average American uses 3.5 times as much water as we do. So I feel like we’re on the right track…but our aquifer (the Chicot) is being overdrawn by 350 million gallons a day. Which means our few thousand gallons a month help, but not very much.

As is so often the case in our great state, one of the big hurdles to doing anything about the groundwater problem is the lack of regulation. As in, there is no regulation of how much water an individual or company can pump, and no cost for pumping it. And as Tegan Wendland points out in her story, so many of our politicians are cozied up to the industries which benefit from all this free water that there’s little hope of reform any time soon.

The rest of WWNO’s reporting on this topic:

https://www.wwno.org/post/amid-rising-seas-and-record-storms-louisianas-water-running-low

https://www.wwno.org/post/louisianas-biggest-source-groundwater-losing-water-fast

https://www.wwno.org/post/industry-overuse-puts-capital-city-drinking-water-risk

https://www.wwno.org/post/groundwater-threats-compounded-changing-climate

https://www.wwno.org/post/lawmakers-sidestep-groundwater-crisis-decades

I generally try to stay out of politics, especially online, but I guess the stress of the last year is getting to me…and I have accepted the challenge from Summer Kinard (the editor of Park End Books and Darkness is as Light) to blog more frequently in the New Year. So, since I had already written this letter to our illustrious senator John Neely Kennedy, I now share it with you, and check off “blog this week” from my to-do list.

If you’re wondering what I’m responding to, the statement Kennedy, Ted Cruz, and others posted can be read here.

Dear Senator Kennedy,

I am writing to you as one of your constituents from Lafayette. I was initially happy that you won election to be our senator, as I had heard you on Jim Engster’s show several times and found your ideas to be reasonable and generally in line with my own. Since your election, however, I have been repeatedly disappointed in your continual pandering to the whims of President Trump and the far right wing of the Republican party, sometimes even to the detriment of your own constituency. 

Up to this point, I have considered this the sort of “playing politics” that we can’t seem to escape in today’s political climate. While I wasn’t happy about some of your statements and votes, I have not felt compelled to contact you until today.

This morning it came to my attention that you intend to vote to reject the electors of states whose elections were decided by narrow margins. I think this is a terrible idea, and there are several reasons why. I will follow the format of your public statement to elucidate them.

First, your concern seems to be not that there actually was election fraud, but that many people BELIEVE there may have been election fraud. While I agree that it is vital in a democracy (or a republic) for the people to have faith in the public institutions, and the elections process in particular, I find it disingenuous for the very people who have stoked, if not created, this distrust with their own statements to now say that distrust is so rampant that we should not trust our elections. If you want people to have faith in the elections, please convince your fellow party members to stop lamenting (without evidence) how fraudulent they are.

Secondly, in the statement you suggest that if the Supreme Court had heard the two cases that were brought to it, this whole problem might somehow have been solved. The Supreme Court is not required to hear all cases brought to it; it is its prerogative to decline to hear a case that it finds to have been satisfactorily dealt with in the lower courts. It is telling that out of the dozens of voter fraud cases which were lodged after this election, only two even were worthy to be considered for a hearing by the Supreme Court. To claim that the election ought not to be certified because Republican lawyers brought a slew of unsubstantiated claims of fraud and the Supreme Court declined to waste their time any of them is ludicrous.

If your true motive is to shore up faith in our elections, it is unclear to me why Senator McConnell has not brought to the floor a request for a special commission prior to now. Why wait until two weeks before the inauguration, when he has had two months since the election to address this problem?

If you’ve read this far, Senator Kennedy, I commend you and thank you for taking the thoughts of your constituents seriously. I’d like to take just a moment more to express to you why I think that it is so vitally important that you vote to accept the electors of all the states on January 6. 

As you are well aware, we are in an extremely divisive political climate. We have had an election; all the evidence suggests that it was as free and fair as could be hoped. Undoubtedly, if there were actual evidence of the sort of wide-spread voter fraud that the Trump administration, for one, claims, they would have brought it out long before now. Yet this has simply not happened. Thus based on the evidence, to continue to claim that the elections were “rigged” is not only a lie, but is the very basis for the lack of faith in elections that you and your co-authors lament.

It is in your power, and the power of your Republican colleagues, to change the narrative. I understand that voting to reject the electors will play well with much of the staunchly conservative base here in Louisiana; I implore you to step above petty politics and look out for the good of the nation as a whole. Take a stand for the truth, Senator Kennedy. If there is no evidence, despite two months of searching by election officials and Republican supporters,  why drag our elections through the mud any longer? 

What our country needs to restore its faith in our elections is not more grandstanding, not more political theater, and not a 10-day commission. It is for men and women of good faith to tell the truth about the facts as they are, and to allow our political process to continue to work, as it has done for over two centuries now.

Thank you for your time, Senator Kennedy. May God bless you in your work on our behalf, and I wish you all the best in this new year.

Happy New Year, y’all.