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The
Martha's Vineyard Times is a weekly publication.
May 12 - May 18, 2005 Edition
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A puzzle May 12, 2005 This page has been and will continue to be a determined supporter of library renovations and expansions in all the Vineyard towns. Good, free, inviting public libraries are benchmarks for communities that place a high value on literacy, intellectual development, and communication among residents. Of course, libraries are not what they use to be. And, there is a sense in which that observation is disappointing. For instance, modern libraries have greatly multiplied their services, but in many cases they have not enlarged their capacity to cram volume after volume onto the shelves. It was the case years ago that high school students contemplating college, or college students contemplating graduate school, studied university catalogues to discover how many volumes the institution's library possessed. Towns celebrated their libraries as badges of progressive attitudes toward citizenship and community development. Today, the question is whether the campus or the town library is Wi-Fi-ed to the max. But, at the same time, new libraries have added audio-visual capacity, computer and internet facilities, meeting rooms, and an astonishing array of outreach programs intended to grow the library's constituency, beginning with the youngest readers and progressing to the oldest who may be hearing or vision impaired and in need of special services. It is a great menu of things to be done. Seen in this light, there is little that is persuasive about the objections that often greet even well developed plans to improve, modernize, and enlarge libraries. The downfall of the Edgartown library expansion plan is case in point. We are persuaded that despite the arguments made by supporters of the mystifying decision of the town zoning board to reject the library expansion, town residents and voters had, in all of the traditional and authoritative ways provided for voters to do so, signaled their approval of the library's proposal and their willingness to fund it. And financial assistance was assured, at least to the extent that such assurances from government agencies may be relied upon. It is not enough to say that folks on the street had doubts, or that one neighbor or another complained, or that the turnout at the town meetings was light. Voters are not silly, they are not uninformed, or at least there was no attempt by the library board to keep voters in the dark about these plans. Voters' decisions, made in town meeting, deserve respect. So, it is puzzling and disheartening to contemplate the action of the town zoning board of appeals. Their objections concerning parking and traffic, in light of the solid support demonstrated at two town meetings and by several town boards, ought to have been considered in pre-hearing discussions, so that the library planners might have taken steps to address whatever were the legitimate criticisms. To have spurned the decision of voters who agreed to the library expansion in town meeting votes by rejecting the plan at the eleventh hour was an error that the library board and the zoning board ought to recognize and move to correct. |
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