Opinion: Column

Read between the lines: Library proposal spells financial disaster

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Also by Joey Labuz:

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After months of debate, a proposal to build a new central library has been approved. Near as I can tell from the wrong end of I-90, it doesn’t seem like anyone is going loco for libraries, bonkers for books or even deranged for the Dewey decimal system. 

It might just be that people haven’t found out about all the great things that come with the new library. After all, the developers seem pretty psyched. The Fiore-Irgens website touts the many benefits of such new development, but no one else seems to have caught reading rabies. Maybe it’s because the developer suggests that, coupled with the Overture Center, the library complex will bring added vigor downtown Madison. Excuse me for not foaming at the mouth. 

Also, the new library will be accessible by bus, car, bike or foot. I’m not quite sure how that counts as an advantage, but we’ll let it slide and move on without further comment. 

Other benefits include the redevelopment of the old library structure into a multi-use building with a hotel and parking structure. This is, all in all, a good thing.  

Finally there is the $13 million in unfunded costs the city will be responsible for - this is, all in all, a bad thing. 

Now I am two things: a man, and a pretty smart shopper. I know that you shouldn’t buy things if you don’t have the money for them, and there is no exception for libraries. Kudos to the city for having a plan on where about $30.6 million of the $43.6 million will come from, but I don’t think they’ll get partial credit on this one. 

Even if everything goes according to plan and the hotel rooms to be built are fuller than Kobayashi on the Fourth of July, it will take the city over 16 years to recoup the phantom $13 million via taxes - and that is assuming we cut one of those really sweet zero percent financing deals with GMAC before this whole credit thing went south. 

It’s not that I’m anti-library, we just don’t have $13 million lying around right now, and if we did, I might be more inclined to spend it on…well…if our leaders get us to a $13 million surplus, they can do whatever the Hell they want with it.  

We are spending money we don’t have and assuming everything will work out fine. With the Overture debacle serving as a warning to all, some people are still living in a fantasy land: the Fiore-Irgens Web site boasts that the entrance to the library will be located on West Washington Ave. “which is among the most prominent boulevards in the State if not the region.” Now I lived on West Washington sophomore year, and I can say - with authority - that this statement only makes sense if you are a forty-year-old man with a Greyhound ticket and a penchant for malt liquor. Has anyone gone to Chicago and, while walking down Michigan Ave., said ‘it’s nice, but it needs a Kelley’s Market’?”

If this isn’t fantasy, then it’s at the very least a few books short of a reading room.  

Joe Labuz (labuz@wisc.edu) is a senior majoring in biomedical engineering