Photo by Sanja Gjenero via morgueFile.com
A meeting at which the member municipalities of the Community Library were to address changes to the agreement sought by Twin Lakes will likely not happen until January.
That was the assessment of Paddock Lake village President Marlene Goodson, who is hosting the meeting and has been trying to find a suitable date for municipal representatives and their attorneys to meet. Goodson addressed the subject at Wednesday’s regular monthly Paddock Lake Village Board meeting.
A meeting was set for this coming Monday, but that fell through when one municipality could not attend.
Goodson said finding a date where there can be full participation by the municipalities is important enough to wait until next month. She also said the public will be invited to the meeting with a citizens comments item on the agenda.
“I’m opening it up,” Goodson said.
Twin Lakes officials had been pushing for a meeting in December.
Twin Lakes representatives are seeking changes to the agreement that governs the joint library to have expenditures shown by branch. The Community Library has three branches — in Salem, Twin Lakes and Silver Lake — and has five municipal members: Salem, Paddock Lake, Twin Lakes, Randall and Silver Lake.
A key issue during the upcoming discussions of changing the agreement is likely to be representation on the Community Library Board. When the library was formed in the early 1990s, the charter agreement called for equal representation from each municipality on the library board. Since then, state statutes have been changed to call for presentation based on population for joint libraries.
An open question is whether the opening of the agreement for the changes Twin Lakes seeks means that the representation section will need to be updated. If it is updated, Goodson pointed out, power on the library board will decisively shift to Salem, which would likely have four representatives and each of the other four municipalities one. The fate of the current high school representative is unclear.
