Should the Vinings Library be Privatized or Voluntarily Run?

Their doors weren’t shut completely during the recent county budget deliberations, but all county libraries will have reduced operating hours beginning next week.

The Vinings Library will now be open Monday through Wednesday from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. and Thursday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. The will be open Monday through Wednesday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and on Thursdays from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.

After Cobb Commission Chairman Tim Lee unveiled to help reduce the $31 million budget by closing 13 of the 17 county libraries, county residents showed their support of the libraries by writing e-mails, and commenting on a newly created Facebook page devoted to saving the county libraries.

to allow all libraries to remain open but with reduced hours and a 10 percent budget cut for all county departments and five mandatory furlough days for all county employees.

At a recent Vinings Homeowners Association meeting, Cobb Commissioner Bob Ott discussed the idea about privatizing some of the libraries including the one in Vinings.

“There's a group called Library Systems and Services Inc., LSSI, that that's what they do,’’ Ott said. “What you do is you keep ownership of the buildings and the books and things like that and they come in and operate it.’’

Ott even floated the idea of making the Vinings Library a volunteer library. He mentioned that it “costs about $135,000’’ to operate the Vinings Library and that “most of the other libraries are anywhere from the $50,000 to $70,000 range to operate.’’

"The Vinings Library is really unique because you all are so well organized in your different groups that you could figure out what to do,’’ he said. “What I’m going to do is get one or two people from the Vinings Homeowners Association, one or two from Vinings Civic Club and other civic groups in Vinings to explore how can we keep the Vinings Library open if we turn it into a volunteer library. That’s never been done in Cobb, but it seems that since Vinings is such a tight community with so many civic groups, it’s very unique relative to a lot of the other smaller libraries. ‘’

The Vinings Library is here for now, but during these tight economic times, its future is most certainly in doubt.

“We’ve got to figure out why it costs so much more to operate the Vinings Library,’’ said Ott. “I can tell you it’s one of the more expensive ones to operate…When the chairman starts looking at the budget, (the expensive) libraries are the ones that are going to be looked at first. So what we have to do, the community here, is we have to kind of get there first, and kind of get a handle on what’s going on with that library.’’