How a fight over $1 led Grants Pass library lovers to protest in the streets

Published 1:00 pm Monday, January 13, 2025

The Josephine County Board of Commissioners’ unexpected vote last Monday to terminate the lease of the area’s central library has ruffled more than a few pages.

Library lovers hit the streets for a rally Thursday. Two commissioners now say they have zero plans to evict the Grants Pass branch from its home in a county-owned building in February, but merely want to renegotiate the $1-a-year lease.

But for public library leaders — still leery from a two-year closure of the library system back in 2007 — distrust is thicker than air in the dusty stacks.

“When you leap to termination and you’re giving someone 30-days notice, I call that an eviction,” said Library Director Kate Lasky. “What else were we supposed to think?”

Grants Pass, a town of 40,000 wedged between Interstate 5 and the Rogue River in Southern Oregon, has faced library funding battles for decades.

But things came to a head last Monday during a commission meeting featuring two newly-minted officials — County Chair Ron Smith and Commissioner Chris Barnett — who had been sworn in some four hours earlier, following their November election wins.

The third commissioner, John West, brought up the agenda item. He was recalled by voters during a December special election; by last Monday’s meeting, he had two days left in office.

City workers told the three-person commission of the 15,000-foot library building‘s leaky roof and aging ventilation system, estimating the total repair bill at $120,000. The county’s property manager said comparable downtown rents run about $1 a foot, not the lone buck the library has paid for the past seven years.

“This has become a burden on the taxpayer,” said West, describing how the library could be repurposed for other county departments.

But, he added, “it doesn’t mean they’re kicked out of the building.”

Following West’s motion, the three commissioners voted unanimously to terminate the lease. Then came the backlash.

On Thursday, dozens of bibliophiles gathered outside the county courthouse, bearing books and placards reading “literacy matters” and “respect for our library is long overdue.”

Smith and Barnett say the vote is only part of a rent dispute that got blown out of proportion.

“We just want to renegotiate the lease. Very simple,” Smith, an electric sign businessman, told The Oregonian/OregonLive.

Barnett, a real estate agent, went further: He said there were no plans to deliver the 30-day written notice required to terminate the lease. (Smith and Barnett are forming a two-person commission until next week, when they’ll appoint a third member to replace West.)

The next step will be for lawyers for the county and library to meet, Barnett said.

“They’re trying to set a date to talk, and that’s it,” he said. “There’s no padlock (on the door). There is no ‘get out.’ There is no letter to say you have to be out of the building. It’s nonexistent.”

Neither he nor Lasky, the library director, knew when a meeting might occur. And Lasky declined to say if she’d consider paying more for the space at 200 N.W. C St.

Josephine County has both a long and short history of disputing library funding. Just over a year ago, the commission let a conservative activist opt out of the library’s special tax district — prompting a lawsuit. The library prevailed on procedural grounds, though a new challenge is expected.

And library leaders with good memories still recall how tax reforms passed statewide in the late 1990s let Josephine County officials convert a special library levy charging $0.33 per $1,000 of assessed property value into a permanent tax hike going into county coffers.

But 33 cents doesn’t go as far as it used to, and by 2007 the county was facing funding shortfalls due to declining timber revenue. The library shut its doors for the next two years.

“Trauma is too hard a word to use, but we definitely still feel very bruised from that whole experience,” said Jennifer Robertson, president of Grants Pass Friends of the Library.

It took volunteers, donor dollars and matching county funds to reopen the library system’s four locations. In 2017, voters seeking to create a dedicated funding stream approved the Josephine Community Library District, which covers Grants Pass, Cave Junction and smaller communities.

The district has renovated several smaller libraries, and has big plans for a new central library on land purchased on Sixth Street, the main drag in Grants Pass.

In the meantime, the central branch offers plenty beside books — including children’s programming, “canine reading buddies,” a community room booked out well in advance, and free wifi that’s so popular residents are known to log-on from their cars in the parking lot after hours.

Library supporters say the service has value beyond the financial realm.

“I believe in the library, and I believe in a public entity that raises the consciousness of the entire community by being open, available and not partisan,” said Bucky Dennerlein, a library volunteer who attended the Thursday rally. “We’ve got enough of that going on.”