Reading room

ROYAL CITY — Royal City’s library is about to have some breathing room.

“We are hurting for space,” said librarian Jess Rosez. “Sometimes we have our programs indoors and they get a little bit tight. So we're really excited for the expansion.”

The current library, located at 136 Camelia St., is only 1,200 square feet, said Susan Piercy, president of Royal City Friends of the Library.

“It’s tiny; it's not big enough to serve our community,” Piercy said. “We tried to have a meeting in there for our officers, and you can't get more than five or six people in a room.”

The lot where the current library sits has only five parking spaces and no room to expand the existing building, Piercy said, so any expansion would require a new building.

Just as the Friends of the Library began exploring ways to alleviate the situation, Piercy said, COVID-19 came along and delayed things. It wasn’t until late 2021 or early 2022 that real progress began to be made.

“There were several places discussed,” Piercy said. “And the city finally said, ‘Well, there's a lot on Camelia Street that the city owns, to be used for municipal purposes only, and that would be a good place for a library.’ And we looked at it and we said, ‘Yes, it would.’”

The Friends of the Library submitted a lease to the city, and were told that the city would sign it when the blueprints and plans were ready to go. Currently the organization has a floor plan and rendering of the potential library from an architect, and is working with several architects to get blueprints drawn up, Piercy said.

The lot the city is offering is almost right across the street from the existing library, bordering the city park. The new library will be about 4,000 square feet, Piercy said, and will include a 630-square-foot community meeting room, so that community organizations can hold meetings right downtown, rather than driving out to the community center at the Royal City Golf Course, several miles east of town.

“The other thing that we'd like to do is, of course, expand the children's area,” Piercy said. “It's just so teeny, you can't even have a story hour. You have a mom, a toddler and a baby in a stroller and you've just about filled up the space for story time.”

The new children’s space will be 630 feet, according to the architect’s rendering. There will also be a space set aside for teens to hang out and read or study, and computers that kids may not have access to at home, Piercy said, for doing homework.

“Yes, they have phones,” Piercy said. “But you know, it's tough to write an essay and send it in to your teacher from your cell phone.”

The Friends of the Library are also exploring the possibility of musical instruments available for checkout, Piercy said, or seed packets, which she said she’s seen at other libraries in the region.

The expansion comes as the NCW Libraries system, of which Royal City is a part, is in the process of updating all of its libraries with fixtures, furniture, lighting and other infrastructure. The project, called “Reimagining Spaces,” will cost in the neighborhood of $10 million, NCW Libraries told the Herald in December.

“If this new library in Royal City becomes a reality, then we can put that money towards that and really further the dollars that that Royal City Friends and other funders are able to bring to it,” Tim Dillman, Executive Assistant-Special Projects for NCW libraries, said in an interview last week.

A community library is a sort of partnership between the local city government and NCW Libraries, Dillman explained. The city provides and maintains the location, and the library system supplies the staff, furnishings and, of course, the books. The library’s collection is limited by the available space, both Piercy and Dillman said, so more room means more books, DVDs and other materials.

“The other thing that is really significant for us is that our current space really has a very limited staff work area or break area,” Dillman said. “That will also be a nice addition in this new space, is the potential for staff to have a private area to work on programming and do all their operational work outside of public view.”

The Friends of the Library have their eye on one more dream as well, Piercy said: a local history collection to preserve the memories of Royal City’s earliest settlers.

“Royal City has only been around since 1960 as an incorporated town,” she said. “But even in that short time (there are) historical documents, pictures, the stories of the people who came here and broke out the sagebrush and moved out of the way of the new dams. All those people who were here from the beginning, they're passing away, and we want their stories to be preserved … So that's the cherry on top. That's a big thing that we're hoping to offer.”

The money for the new building is coming from the Friends of the Library, Piercy said. The city will probably sell the current building, she added, but no plans have been made for the proceeds of that sale.

The Friends of the Library hasn’t done a lot of fundraising so far, Piercy said, as they’ve been concentrating on the logistics of acquiring the land and making sure that any fundraising is handled legally. One possibility under consideration, she said, is called “Library by the Foot.” That would allow community members to sponsor a square foot of the new building, with their name on it, for $100. The $400,000 that would bring in, she said, would go a long way toward defraying costs.

Royal City isn’t the only library looking into the possibility of putting the Reimagining Spaces money into expanding.

“As our board has designated some money to be able to invest into these spaces, it's really spurred a number of communities to start dreaming about what they want the long term potential of their library to be,” Dillman said. “We have a Friends of the Library group up in Republic, who is actively pursuing a new construction. The city of Entiat has recently decided that they want to start to explore the feasibility of a new city-offices-space-and-library kind of combo building.”

Coulee City officials are also exploring the possibility of a new building, Dillman added.

“Honestly, I am excited for NCW (Libraries) to do what they’re going to do,” Rosez said.

“I've just been so grateful and impressed with Susan and the other members of the Friends in the work they've been doing,” Dillman said. “This is all volunteer, and they've been pursuing all these avenues to try to make this dream a reality. My hat’s just off to them.”

Joel Martin can be reached via email at jmartin@columbiabasinherald.com.