Sutton deserves a new library

Is there a town anywhere that loves its library as much as Sutton?

Can you imagine another community in which numerous residents could be convinced to drive a half hour and sit through hours of a public meeting just to put their thoughts on the record about libraries?

Sutton fielded enough people to speak in three-minute increments to fill an hour’s worth of the Mat-Su Borough Assembly’s time.

Listening to those residents, it’s not hard to see why. The library is a public meeting space. For children who wait to catch the bus there in the morning, it’s almost a day care. It’s a place to get needed government forms. It houses what is essentially a reading advocacy group that promotes literacy for the local elementary school. It’s a study hall for high school students. If you don’t have an Internet connection at home, as one can assume a lot of people in Sutton don’t, the library offers a connection to the world that is becoming increasingly vital. The library is an economic driver, attracting new residents to the area and boosting the tax base.

And, of course, it’s also a library — a place to get books, a place to learn.

An argument could be made, as Mat-Su Borough Assemblyman Warren Keogh did at a recent assembly meeting, that the building is the most important piece of infrastructure the borough owns along the Glenn Highway outside of Palmer.

It’s no wonder, then, that the community raised $30,000 on its own to build a new one since it became clear the old building is too small and too old.

So we praise the assembly for digging deep to find money to get the project to build a new library off the ground.

With any luck, this recognition of the importance of public libraries isn’t a one-time deal. The last time a new borough library went up was at least 10 years ago in Big Lake. Hopefully, the next new one will come sooner than a decade from now.

Wasilla, for instance, has needed a new building for years. Anyone who’s been there recently can see why. It’s a small, cramped space with a tiny, bizarrely situated parking lot.

The process in Wasilla seems a lot more complicated. There is a group advocating for a new building. The mayor at one time wanted to put it in the Meta Rose Square, but those plans fell through.

Palmer and Wasilla are also seemingly constantly battling for library funding. Just this year, the cities again threatened to charge nonresidents an annual fee to use the facilities. They even went so far as to threaten to say that if more money doesn’t come in they might have to close their doors.

It’s a nearly intractable problem since the borough needs to run its own libraries and isn’t exactly sitting on a pile of library cash.

And that’s yet another reason to be happy for Sutton; it managed to get a building project going even in a tough economic climate.