Stephen Vance, Editor
Unless an agreement can be reached very, very soon residents in the Sydenham area of the municipality will lose their long-held library privileges at the Owen Sound North Grey Union Public Library. Should that happen (and by absolutely no means should Meaford’s council allow that to happen) residents of the former Sydenham Township will have every right to be furious, but the reality is we shouldn’t even be in this mess at all.
The library boards for both the OSNGUPL and the Meaford Public Library are in many ways doing exactly what ratepayers would expect them to – Meaford is attempting to ensure that ratepayers in this municipality are receiving value for the money allocated each year to the service contract that allows Sydenham residents full use of the OSNGUPL, as well as attempting to gain access to the Owen Sound facility for all Meaford residents. Not that many would take advantage of that access, but for some students who reside in Meaford but attend school in Owen Sound, that access is important. The OSNGUPL on the other hand is doing what they should. They are trying to ensure that any agreement with Meaford is not only fair to the other partners of the OSNGUPL, but also that the fee charged to Meaford adequately covers the cost of offering the service to those Sydenham residents.
Caught in the middle are Sydenham residents who are guilty of nothing other than loving their library, but could very well be punished with the revocation of their OSNGUPL cards before the new year arrives.
I’ve never really understood why libraries aren’t a provincial or county responsibility, especially after the forced amalgamations of many communities in this province more than 15 years ago.
We shouldn’t be fighting about access to libraries, folks. Residents in Sydenham shouldn’t have had to make the trip to the council chamber this week to impress upon council the urgency of the situation. And they wouldn’t have had to if libraries were managed regionally rather than municipally.
If we had a regional library system, borders and boundaries would be much less of an issue, though there would no doubt be an outlier or two that would require some massaging with reciprocal agreements. If we had a regional library system, the OSNGUPL wouldn’t have felt the need to implement a ridiculously, almost laughably, high non-resident fee of $500 (clearly aimed at keeping Meaford in line), and the MPL wouldn’t be trying to justify the dollars spent on a service contract by trying to drill down to the number of books borrowed by individual library card holders at the OSNGUPL.
We can’t dwell on the “ifs” however, we need to fix the now, and work on a better system for tomorrow.
As one of the concerned residents who attended council this week to express his views so properly pointed out, there is far too much of the “us against them” in the debate around this issue, and until we can move beyond that mentality, it will be difficult to achieve any real progress.
If I were a member of Meaford’s council, I would be strongly encouraging the Meaford library board to abandon their stance on a one year contract, and I think two years is even too short if the period of a new contract is to be used to explore and lobby for a county library system. While I personally feel that a three year contract would be the perfect middle ground, that would drop the issue into the hands of a newly elected council in 2019, and I’m not so sure that makes much sense. So why not agree to finish out the five years that were remaining on the contract recently terminated, providing that access is opened up to all Meaford residents so that our students attending school in Owen Sound will have full library privileges along with the handful of residents who might prefer using the OSNGUPL. Then, use those five years to get the ball rolling, and start lobbying for support to establish a county-wide library system.
There’s no doubt that the contract as it existed wasn’t working as well as it could have for this municipality, but residents of western Meaford shouldn’t have their library cards held hostage because two library boards couldn’t come to an agreement. That isn’t right. That isn’t fair.
Libraries are supposed to bring us together as a community, not tear us apart. Rather than arguing about who to allow into which library and at what cost, let’s instead debate the merits of tearing down borders when it comes to our libraries, and work together to ensure that everyone in this county has equal access to all of our libraries.
