03-24-2026 Commissioners [3:10-8:10]

Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. We need to do a motion to take those under advisement. Alrighty. I move to, as you said, take those under advisement. I've been psyched. All right. And the motion on the favor say aye. Aye. All right. I don't see Steve Warren as someone else here to represent the Vietnam Veterans this morning. Steve's not here. Don't see him. Okay. I can tell you that Steve's going to use the courthouse for the moral. We can represent the Vietnam Veterans this morning. I'm assuming he's asking for some reason what he had in mind. Can we go ahead and do this? I'm assuming any unknown hazards or whatever I would move to improve the use of grounds for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Service. Say. I'm going to have a motion. All in favor say aye. Aye. All right. Next step is Mr. Nathan Watson with his library report. So thanks for giving me an opportunity to talk. I'm Nathan Watson. I'm the director of the vet for public library. And I just wanted to give you an annual report on 2025. I know that you appoint two members to our board. And I think that, you know, just moving forward. So we have a good relationship, a transparency. That I tell you what the library's been doing. I'm very proud of the work that we're doing over there. So the late great Bob Bridge used to say when he first moved to town, Mayor John Williams approached him and he said, you know, you could always tell the quality of a community by the quality of their library. And I don't know how true that is, but Bob told me that all the time. So I take it to heart, and I hope that after this report, you guys will see that the vet for public library is doing all that can to live up to that expectation. So really what it means to run a library in today's world is that you're running three organizations. You're running a physical library that where we have the books and the things that you take out and bring back. You're running a digital library where we provide thousands and thousands and thousands of titles that you can check out from your phone. You can check out from your smart TV, from your tablet, any of those electronic devices. And then we also have the service part of the library, which is attending to people's needs, teaching them things, and providing programs. So keep that in mind. I want to throw a lot of numbers at you real quick here. Last year, we had 269,000 materials circulated. If you're looking at that, I'm jumping around just a tad. But enjoy the pictures in the testimonies because there's a lot of smiling faces in there. 269,000 materials were circulated. Of those, 156 were digital. So that means that of every 10 items that we circulate, six of those are moved by not even coming into the library. It happens straight on your device. That is higher than it ever has been. So 60% of our stuff doesn't walk out the door. It goes straight to you. That being said, you would think that our door numbers are down. But last year, we had 71,000 visits. This is a, we're on a record high trend right now. That means, even though we don't have people coming in to get books, they're coming in for other things. They're coming in for our service. They're coming in for our customer service. They're coming in to learn things. We have 15,000 active library users now. So we cover everything, white river north, and then Mitchell library covers everything south.