JACKSON, Miss. (WLBT) – Jackson city leaders are considering issuing a bond to address issues at Thalia Mara Hall and various public libraries.
“What we are studying is a proposal to issue debt… a bond issuance to be able to support some of this capital infusion that needs to happen,” Chief Financial Officer Fidelis Malembeka said. “This should happen soon.”
Budget presentations continued Monday, with the city council hearing from Jackson Public Schools, the Jackson Redevelopment Authority, and the Jackson/Hinds Library System.
The presentation comes just days after Thalia Mara had to be shut down due to “early microbial activity,” and months after the council deeded over the Eudora Welty Library to the state, leaving JHLS with just five libraries in the capital city.
[READ: Thalia Mara Hall temporarily closed for maintenance, microbial remediation]
“We currently have five of eight libraries open, and in Ward One, as you know, the Charles Tisdale Library was closed and demolished. In Ward Six, the Richard Wright Library is permanently closed. And, as everyone knows, the Eudora Welty Library, which is in Ward Seven, has been closed,” JHLS Executive Director Floyd Council said. “And then there [are] several other libraries… that are pending repair.”
Those libraries include the Willie Morris Library and Medgar Evers Library. Currently, Medgar Evers is being cooled by temporary chillers installed by the city of Jackson. Council did not go into details about the needs at Morris.
“The facilities that are open and notably pending repairs in the county are the Evelyn Taylor Majure Library in Utica [which] requires some repairs to the roof and other substantial repairs, and our Byram Library is also pending repairs. In the county, the Annie T. Jeffers Library in Bolton has been closed for a considerable period,” he said.
He said the Library Board of Trustees was working with the county on getting that branch open to the public, and residents should “hear something about that in the future.”
As for libraries in Jackson, JHLS is an additional $50,000 increase over last year’s budget allocation to address structural issues early on.
The total amount being requested by the library system is $1,997,000, a little less than half of the system’s $4.2 million budget.
“The first thing I would say is, with $50,000… once Evers gets a new air conditioner, the first thing we’d like to do is service that air conditioner, clean the coils every year, things like that, to prevent us from ever being in a position where it becomes a total replacement,” said JHLS Chief Financial Officer Justin Carter. “That’s number one on my list… and HVAC is obviously the number one problem with most of our branches.”
Council told council members that maintaining library buildings is akin to people maintaining their homes, such as plumbing issues, broken doors, and the like, but the system has little money to address them.
“When we came to the council last year, we proposed a more comprehensive plan, out of which we asked the Council for $750,000 to actually develop a comprehensive plan for all of the facilities, and this was in response to normal operations and patrons concerns about, you know, while libraries were having to close, how could we fix things?” he said.
“And I think that our last proposal was, if the money [was] actually presented to us under the guidance of our board, then we [could] quickly respond to these things, to keep the buildings open by making repairs,” Council continued. “One thing that is for certain, if you don’t have any money allocated to do anything, there’s not anything that you can do in response.”
Jackson has been struggling to maintain libraries for years. In 2017, the Charles Tisdale Library closed due to black mold issues and flooding in the basement. The popular East Northside Drive branch was torn down in 2022, about five years after it had been abandoned by the library system and ransacked by vagrants.
A year later, library officials were moving books out of the Richard Wright Library after vandals had wreaked havoc on the McDowell Road facility, with Council telling WLBT at the time that he was “determined to make sure that this situation here… does not become another Tisdale.”
Wright was the only library providing service for South Jackson.
Then, in December, the council approved transferring ownership of the Welty Library to the Mississippi State Department of Archives and History. The agency is planning to tear down the one-time flagship branch to make way for a green space for the Two Mississippi Museums.
Even with the closures, JHLS Board President Peyton Smith told council members that libraries in Jackson remain in high demand, pointing to the 6,962 people who visited the Medgar Evers branch in June.
By comparison, documents obtained by WLBT showed that the Jackson Zoological Park had fewer than 8,400 people visit it between January 1 and July 16 of this year.
“We think there is a significant demand for library service in this city that’s going unmet because we have closed branches,” he said. “We believe that moving back toward full service and having those eight branches is probably going to be the right number.”
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