City wants fair share of books

Whitefish library supporters believe the new city library should receive some of the assets from the county library, Whitefish City Manager Chuck Stearns said Tuesday.

Taxes paid by Whitefish residents constitute 12 percent of the county’s tax base, Stearns said.

“Our people have been paying 12 percent of all the bills for a number of years,” he said. “One way would be to think we should get 12 percent of the countywide library books.”

The four proposals from the Whitefish group represent a dollar amount less than that total, he said.

Stearns said Whitefish community leaders recognize that county library officials have compromised in what books they’ve agreed to leave in Whitefish — especially books donated by Whitefish residents or organizations and books that had been in the old city library “and that’s appreciated.”

However, he pointed out that at the beginning of negotiations about the library’s assets, nothing was to be left in Whitefish.

And he’s worried that the books relocated to other county libraries “will be the cream of the crop.”

“We think in order to best serve people around Whitefish it makes sense to keep all or most of the books there,” Stearns said.

While Whitefish has asked for books and other items in the library catalog, Stearns said it haven’t asked for any equipment or furnishings, and Whitefish tax dollars helped pay for those items, too.

Stearns said he and others in Whitefish are disappointed that county library officials are sticking to their plan to close the branch library for about two weeks at the end of June and start to remove some items from the Whitefish library very soon.

“They’ve said they need months to move things out and a two-week closure,” Stearns said. “We think some of that isn’t in their purview and we say the interlocal agreement doesn’t allow for that.”

Whitefish leaders had proposed both groups work out of the library from June 1 through the end of August, he said. “We’ll transition in while you transition out. But so far that hasn’t been the case.”

The Whitefish library will be open to any resident of Flathead County, Stearns said, just as county libraries are.