Hub & Spokes

TOUCHET - Chuck Car- ruthers remembers how doz- ens of residents of Prescott volunteered their time and resources to launch the city's library in a space donated by the Lions Club.

"There were 66 people who donated their time and skills," said Carruthers, who was mayor of Prescott at the time. "The district provided the books. It was a coopera- tive effort."

The year was 1999 and the space was 900 square feet. More than a dozen years later, the community has far outgrown its little library, so its residents are thrilled they will get a new one that will be almost three times the size.

And again, it's a collabo- ration between Prescott residents and the district, which they say really listens to its constituents.

"To see it will now move into a bigger space is great," Carruthers said.

The former Prescott mayor, who owns a shop fabri- cating race cars, was among half a dozen Prescott residents who traveled down to Touchet Monday night for a meeting at which the Walla Walla County Rural Library District invited public com- ment on its $5.4 million fa- cilities expansion plan.

About 100 people from Burbank, Touchet, Walla Walla, College Place and Prescott were on hand for the meeting at the Touchet High School Commons and dozens of them waxed positively about the district's ambitious capital improvement plan.

The district, which already has $3.5 million for its library construction initiative and will borrow much of the remainder from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, plans new facilities at each of its branches except Vista Hermosa. Its 2012 - 2016 strategic plan includes the construction of a central library in the "Donut Hole" of urban growth in the unin- corporated part of the county near Walla Walla.

In the case of Prescott, the district recently purchased a former teacher's residence from the Prescott School District and will use it as the core for its new 2,600-square-foot library complete with computer desks, meeting space and a kid's corner.

Most of the speakers from Prescott gushed over the plans.

"The library is one of the few safe places in town (for) after school," said one mother of two who moved to Prescott a year ago and was excited it had a library. With a four-year-old and a six-year- old, it's tough to drive in to Walla Walla several times a week, she explained.

Some in the county have criticized the district's plans for its new central library in the Walla Walla area, claiming it would duplicate services offered by that city's existing library, but propo- nents of the idea and district officials defended the need for the "mother ship" facility.

Interim district director Aletha Bonebrake, who opened the meeting with a lengthy presentation of the rural district's vision for its branch expansions, said the central library will function as the hub to its spokes of branches, housing its regional administrative office, system wide materials, computer systems and so on.

"We have 17,000 (branch) users to take care of, but nowhere to put all the books and media," she said.

Besides, Bonebrake ar- gued, only 20 percent of Walla Walla's residents are library card holders, leaving plenty more to be served by a second facility. The figure compares to at least 60 per- cent of rural county residents who hold cards and an aver- age of 50 percent in urban libraries on the west side of the Cascade Mountains.