“What’s the urgency?” asked Councilmember Marion S. Barry Jr. That was one of the many unanswered questions the evening of Tuesday, Dec. 5, when Barry’s lame-duck colleague Kathy Patterson tried yet again—and failed yet again—to win D.C. Council approval for a plan to build a new central library on the old Convention Center site.

Over the last year, the library scheme has been peddled vigorously by outgoing Mayor Tony Williams and the Board of Library Trustees and the Federal City Council, both of which are headed by John W. Hill. But the need for a new library is questionable, the financing plan shaky, the proposed location controversial, and many of the proponents’ arguments so dubious that they’ve gradually evaporated over the course of the debate.

Legislation to abandon the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library at 901 G St. NW and authorize a new library seemed to have died on Tuesday, Nov. 21, when the D.C. Council’s Education, Libraries, and Recreation Committee voted to table it. Yet Patterson and her allies decided to keep pushing, even though they clearly didn’t have the nine votes necessary to pass the authorization as an emergency bill. Instead, they tried a rarely-used gambit: a full-council vote to discharge the bill from committee. That required a simple majority of the 12 members present, but even that wasn’t doable: Only six voted for it.

In addition to Patterson, the aye votes were Linda Cropp, Vincent Orange, Adrian Fenty, Jack Evans, and Phil Mendelson. (The first three of those will leave public office with the next term.) Aside from Barry, voting no were Kwame Brown, David Catania, Jim Graham, Vincent Gray, and Carol Schwartz.

The supporters of a new library mostly reiterated arguments made by Williams and Hill, and generally seemed unfamiliar with the issue. A distracted Fenty commended the mayor’s “blue ribbon task force” on the library, which recently published a report that’s an embarrassing goulash of cliché, boilerplate, and irrelevancy. Orange floated by on a cloud, comparing MLK unfavorably to Paris’ Bibliotheque Nationale—which is, of course, the French equivalent of the Library of Congress, not a city library.

The opponents’ remarks were more pungent. Barry termed the claim that a new D.C. library would become a tourist attraction “idiocy”; Brown said the arguments for a new library are “foolishness”; and Schwartz called expectations of major federal funding “just craziness.” It was Barry who nailed the weakness of the case for a new library. It was apparent, he said, that advocates of the scheme just decided they wanted the library “and then went back to try to justify it.” A 6–6 vote says they didn’t.

On Tuesday, Nov. 21, the D.C. Council’s Education, Library and Recreation Committee voted to table legislation authorizing the construction of a new central library. Prominent supporters of the new-library proposal were clearly shocked by the 3-2 vote but were quick to suggest that the bill still might move forward, perhaps as emergency legislation.

A week later, on Nov. 28, the committee eliminated that possibility by a 4-1 margin. The second vote guarantees that the library proposal is comatose until after Mayor Tony Williams, the most powerful elected official to advocate the scheme, leaves office at the beginning of 2007.

At issue was a proposal to build a new central library, at an estimated cost of $275 million, on the old Convention Center site, which is due for major mixed-use redevelopment. Under the plan, the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library at 9th and G Streets NW would be leased to an as-yet-undisclosed entity. Opponents of the scheme argued that MLK is a significant building that should be preserved for its original use and that it could be renovated for far less than the cost of a new structure.

After they voted to stop the legislation, Councilmembers Marion Barry, Carol Schwartz, and Vincent Gray were left with a procedural anomaly. The committee report, produced by the staff of Committee Chairperson Kathy Patterson, strongly endorses the legislation that failed to pass. The 113-page study raises nine questions and answers them all in favor of the plan for a new library put forth by the Board of Library Trustees and the Federal City Council, both of which are headed by John W. Hill. (The report was written by Patterson staffer Jason Juffras, who is a friend of Hill’s.)

The committee’s solution was to reclassify the document as a “special” report rather than a committee one. Since it was not adopted as a committee report, it cannot be the basis for legislative action. Even that was not enough for Schwartz, who voted against accepting the report at all.

The library scheme will no doubt be back on the council’s agenda next year, but on Tuesday both Gray (who in the next term will be council chairman) and Schwartz expressed doubts about the expense. Schwartz noted that Montgomery County’s brand-new central library cost less than one-tenth the estimated price of the proposed D.C. facility.

When the D.C. Public Library announced the arrival of wireless Internet at DCPL locations across the city in September, only a single neighborhood branch out of more than 20 found itself uninvited to the hip Wi-Fi party: the Deanwood Kiosk.

The hot-spot snub shouldn’t have surprised anyone who’s visited the diminutive, 150-square-foot hexagonal outpost on Nannie Helen Burroughs Avenue NE—it looks more like an Italian-ice stand than a city library. Yet despite the fact that the branch claims just one table and a couple of chairs for patrons, DCPL spokesperson Monica Lewis says wireless Internet could reach the kiosk within a few months.

“A broadband line is what’s needed,” says Lewis. “We’ll probably do it sometime in 2007, and probably in the earlier part of the year.”

For now, the kiosk gets by with just a single computer helmed by branch manager Lisa Hook. “There’s no card catalog, but they [DCPL] provide me with the laptop to look up things that visitors need,” Hook says. “It’s pretty good. I do have Internet.”

Henry Docter and Elizabeth Loeb’s 4-and-a-half-year-old son, Jonah, loves books—especially Magic School Bus books, Dr. Seuss books, and books about rocks. After much discussion, Docter took Jonah to the Cleveland Park public library on Oct. 6 so he could get his first library card. There, they were told, all Jonah had to do was sign his name to a form.

That was the catch: If he couldn’t sign his name, he couldn’t get a card. While Jonah’s older sister breezed through this task, Jonah sat at a table with his father and struggled, putting more than 20 minutes into the attempt. “We couldn’t do it,” Docter recalls. Then Jonah began to cry, his father says, and he had to be carried out of the library. No signature and no card.

“It is something that he’s self-conscious about,” Docter says. “It is something that he’s working on.…He knew something was wrong.” Upset over the incident, Docter had his daughter fill out his son’s name the next day; Jonah got his library card.

Meanwhile, Loeb lobbied Chief Librarian Ginnie Cooper to change the policy. By Saturday evening, Cooper gave word that she had abolished the handwriting challenge altogether. “It was an easy decision for us to make,” Cooper says. Making a 4-and-a-half-year-old cry, she says, is “not the kind of impression we want children to have at our libraries.”

But with the new policy in place, the library system wanted one more thing from Jonah: his picture on a brochure trumpeting the policy change. Jonah and his parents are up for it. “He’s cute,” Loeb says. “He’s a cute 4-year-old.”

In 2003, the Williams administration made some noises about replacing the Tenleytown library with a mixed-use structure that would include a new library as well as residential and possibly commercial space. The neighborhood reacted skeptically, and the trial balloon was deflated.

It now turns out, however, that the concept wasn’t abandoned; it was just quietly moved across town. The city has been sketching plans to replace the Benning Library—which, like Tenleytown and two others, has been closed since the end of 2004—with a mixed-use building that would pair a new library with artists’ work/live apartments.

At an evening meeting on Wednesday, Oct. 4, dozens of community members reacted strongly against the plan, and the scheme’s exponents were clearly on the defensive. But they were also prepared. After a reportedly stormy meeting just a few days before, on Sept. 30, the planners introduced a structure devised to minimize critics’ opportunities to speak.

The meeting took place in the board room of the Marshall Heights Community Development Organization, the partially city-funded nonprofit that is the developer of record for the remake of the Benning Library as a mixed-use building. The group, whose office borders the shuttered library, is technically independent of the city but has clearly worked closely with D.C. officials on the Benning plan.

The meeting was moderated by Connie Spinner, who was director of the D.C. State Office of Education until 2004, when she resigned after city auditors found improper travel expenses and misuse of federal grant money. (She was promptly rehired to run the Mayor’s Adult Literacy and Lifelong Learning Initiative.) Identifying herself as a “facilitator,” Spinner set “ground rules” that were part kindergarten, part psychobabble. She then used these guidelines in an attempt to limit questioning of the principal presenters: D.C. Public Library Capital Construction Director Jeff Bonvechio; Derrick Woody, coordinator of the Great Streets Initiative for the Office of Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development; and Jair Lynch, the developer hired by the Marshall Heights CDO (on what he called “a fee-for-service” basis) to get the structure planned and possibly built.

Carrie Thornhill, president of the Marshall Heights CDO, also spoke briefly, apologizing if she misjudged the community’s level of interest in the project. This misjudgment was a major part of the controversy, since the Oct. 4 event had been billed as the last public meeting on a proposal that many in the neighborhood had just discovered. Speaking for Thornhill, Spinner promised that “this is a continuing dialogue.”

It became clear, however, that the dialogue had begun long before local residents were allowed to have their say. The most revealing presentation came from Woody, who disclosed that mixed-use redevelopment plans are in consideration for several library sites, and that “the policy direction we were given is to look at a mix of uses.” He argued that the Shaw community is “coming around” to a plan to redevelop the closed Watha T. Daniel Library as a multi-use structure, and revealed that Tenleytown “will probably come up again as well.”

The library redevelopment process can apparently sustain itself for some time without ever coming into the glare of D.C.’s sunshine laws. Woody said that the R.L. Christian library kiosk on H Street N.E.—a tiny facility without a professional librarian—is well on the way to being replaced by a mixed-use building. But in response to a question, Bonvechio that the D.C. Library Board of Trustees has yet to hear a formal presentation on the R.L. Christian plan.

Later, Lynch claimed that “at no point has the library done more than just listen” and that the Marshall Heights CDO’s “process is running in parallel with the library’s.”

Several local artists extolled the Benning Library multi-use proposal, but most of the audience seemed dubious. After the official presentations, Spinner reluctantly allowed Eddie Rhodes, the local advisory neighborhood commissioner, to speak. Neighborhood residents “just don’t want housing on top of their library,” he said. “I’ve polled over 1,000 people, and only about five people approved.”

That may not be a scientific poll, but it’s clear that there’s a lot of neighborhood distrust of the city’s plan. Ironically, some of that doubt probably would have been dispelled if the city and its allies had started with the sort of open dialogue that Thornhill contends will now ensue.

It was supposed to be a coming-out party for new D.C. Public Library director Ginnie Cooper, who started work last month. Instead, the Aug. 9 meeting of the library system’s Board of Trustees turned into a showdown with citizens at which—according to several observers—Cooper, board president John W. Hill, and board member Richard Levy all lost their tempers.

The catalyst for the confrontation was a series of five questions posed by Peter Fay, the former head librarian of the Library of Congress’s Performing Arts Library at the Kennedy Center and a panelist on WETA’s “Around Town.” But the tension started hours before the trustees convened at the Chevy Chase Library’s meeting room, when Hill privately informed Richard Huffine that he was no longer a member of the board.

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For two years now, the D.C. Library Renaissance Project, founded in 2002 by Ralph Nader, has been trying to get the D.C. Public Library (DCPL) to host adult-literacy classes in branch-library meeting rooms, only to be foiled on the basis of “Rule 7.” The rule, which comes from a list of DCPL meeting-room regulations, states that “No regular classroom meetings are permitted.”

That’s news to Nancy Saum, who holds weekly classes in qigong, a Chinese exercise involving breathing patterns and body postures. Saum says she’s held regular classes without any trouble from the DCPL for nearly two years in one of West End Branch Library’s meeting rooms. Branch Manager Barbara Kubinski says the class is “a library-sponsored event” and therefore permissible. Nor have the Needlechasers of Chevy Chase encountered the restriction: Their group meets monthly in a Chevy Chase Library meeting room to discuss the finer points of quilting. (Karen Butler, manager of that branch, says that regular meetings are allowed but cannot be booked for more than three or four months at a time.) And the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library holds weekly sign-language classes in its open area.

“That rule is abrogated at will by various librarians around the city,” says Robin Diener, director of the Renaissance Project. At a recent D.C. Council hearing on adult literacy, her predecessor, Leonard Minsky, called out several librarians by name and accused them of stonewalling his efforts. Diener speculates that Rule 7 might not be the real issue at stake: “There may be something about the style of Mr. Nader and Mr. Minsky that has a certain brashness to it,” she says. “They don’t like Leonard.”

Former DCPL Interim Director Francis Buckley, who met with Minsky regarding the rule, says that certainly has something to do with it. He admits that Rule 7 isn’t always applied in a hard-and-fast manner—“There is always some discretionary aspect of its application,” he says—and adds that he and librarians “did say that we’d consider relaxing that rule for groups we were cooperating with.” The Renaissance Project, says Buckley, is not such a group. “They had presented this proposal to essentially take over the literacy program of the library.…They had no experience in literacy activities,” he says. “They’re not a reliable organization to work with.”

—Isaiah Thompson

At the June 15 hearing on Mayor Tony Williams’ plan to build a new central library, proponents of abandoning the existing Martin Luther King Jr. Library argued (among other things) that renovating the existing structure would be more expensive than building a new one. Specifically, D.C. Public Library Office of Capital Construction Acting Director Jeff Bonvechio testified that the cost of a new building would be $206 million, while restoring MLK would cost $246 million.

Those figures shouldn’t be taken too seriously. The $206 million price tag is for a building that hasn’t even been designed yet, and $246 million is only a guesstimate. But even Bonvechio concedes that remaking MLK is not pricier because of construction costs but due to the expense of leasing and operating an interim main library during the period—perhaps as much as four years—while MLK is being redone.

Local architect Kent Cooper, who headed a team that in 2000 did a feasibility study for revamping MLK, rejects the new-library proponents’ premise. He testified that the current library could be redone in sections, without ever closing the whole facility. He estimates that the process would take two to two-and-half years.

That may be, but there’s another approach that’s even cheaper: Just shut MLK for a full overhaul, and don’t replace it in the interim. The building has been allowed to deteriorate so badly, and its collections have dwindled so dramatically, that simply closing it wouldn’t affect that many people. As the advocates of a new library stress, there’s little left at MLK to draw people there.

Of course, closing MLK would not be cost-free. The library system would have to lease temporary office space for the staff members who now work on the building’s fourth floor. It would also need to rent storage space for some of MLK’s contents.

But not for all of them. There’s unused space at several of the branch libraries, both for storage and for temporary library services. The West End library, for example, has an entire floor that’s empty. The collections that are unique to MLK—like Washingtoniana and musical scores—could be made available temporarily in one of the branches, while popular novels and the like could just be boxed up for a year or two.

Of course, some people would be inconvenienced. But there will be nuisances regardless of what option is chosen. And closing, readapting, and reopening MLK could be done much faster than renovating the building while it’s in operation or building a whole new library whose design currently consists entirely of buzzphrases like “world-class” and “21st-century.” The mayor’s proposal calls for a new main library by 2011; by then, a refreshed MLK could have been serving 21st-century patrons for several years.

Mayor Tony Williams and his business-establishment allies want to build a new main library at New York Avenue and 10th Street NW on the old Convention Center site, and abandon the Martin Luther King Jr. Library at 901 G Street NW to an uncertain fate. They may very well get their way, but not because they’ve made a case for their scheme. Yesterday, in the second public hearing on the notion—it’s not sufficiently concrete to be called a “plan”—the mayor and company once again fumbled.

The first forum, on April 26 22 at MLK itself, was technically a “town meeting.” At that presentation, Williams and his supporters presented a conceptual plan for a new library that was little more than a napkin sketch. They argued that MLK is in deplorable condition, which no one denies, and that it can’t be retrofitted with computer technology to become a “21st century library.” Supporters of renovating MLK noted that the political elite that now claims to be shocked at the library’s deterioration is directly responsible for 35 years of neglect. They also shredded the 21st-century-library argument, noting that many structures that are substantially older than MLK—including the main building of the Library of Congress—have been adapted successfully to the Internet era.

A few things have changed since April 26. Williams originally hoped to slip his new library through as part of the general budget. Given the hostile reaction to that idea, however, he moved it to a separate bill, “The Library Transformation Act of 2006.” Also, a 2000 feasibility study for revamping MLK, little discussed in recent years, has returned to the spotlight. That plan, done by a team headed by architect Kent Cooper for the American Institute for Architects’ D.C. chapter, answers many of the new-library partisans’ purported objections to MLK—which is why they spent so much of the hearing attacking it.

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The District of Columbia Public Library (DCPL) has restarted a standard bit of librarying that hasn’t happened in eight years: mailing out fine notices to patrons with overdue books and materials. The DCPL had not sent the notices since 1998, when it halted the practice due to budget cuts. But beginning May 1, library patrons will receive a reminder 10 days after the due-back date that they have items that need to be returned.

Offenders won’t be able to pay fines by mail or credit card; they’ll still have to clear their records in person. And the DCPL still has no plans to implement one revenue-generating scheme employed by more than 700 library systems around the country: referring delinquent patrons to a collection agency.

But, coupled with a new fine structure an increased replacement fees for lost or destroyed books, the new policy stands to improve a fine system that collected less than $100,000 last fiscal year, well below the DCPL’s peer systems (“A Fine Excuse,” 2/17).

“The emphasis is still on you checking out books and materials from the public library so you can enjoy and learn from them,” says DCPL spokesperson Monica Lewis. “But remember there are other people that want to also read that book or watch that DVD or listen to that CD, so be prompt in bringing those materials back or renew them.”

On Saturday, April 22, the D.C. Public Library (DCPL) closed four of its branches—the Capitol View, Chevy Chase, Francis A. Gregory, and Woodridge Neighborhood Libraries—for volunteers to participate in a “Fix It Up” day. “What we were trying to do was to go above and beyond what [custodial staff are] physically capable of accomplishing…such as painting and planting and things of that nature,” says DCPL spokesperson Monica Lewis.

But some of those who slogged through the rain that day were instead tasked with general housekeeping that appears to overlap with the duties of janitorial staff. From 9 a.m. until 2 p.m., about a dozen volunteers at each location were asked to wash windows, clean tables, scrape off tape, throw out old furniture, and pick up litter.

“I’m constantly amazed at how little maintenance has been done over the years,” says Richard Huffine, president of the Federation of Friends of the D.C. Public Library, who oversaw the Chevy Chase cleanup. “The sad thing is what [the volunteers are]…doing is what the library should be doing on a regular basis anyway.

The turnout might have been better had the spring cleaning not coincided with Earth Day—or with a 1 p.m. town-hall meeting at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library. Lewis says that the meeting didn’t affect turnout, and that the volunteers’ efforts were appreciated. “They take care of a lot, the facilities people,” Lewis says. “They have to keep branches clean, maintain the mechanics of branches, and that’s a full time job, there, in itself.”