Council 7-28-2026 [18:29-23:31]

We are seeing really great trends, really great numbers. There may be an assumption that library services are less needed in communities but our community is showing us otherwise. We have seen in 2026, compared to 2025, we are seeing more attendance, more usage all across the board. We are really excited and happy with those numbers. We are also providing more for our community and they are responding really well to that, which tells us that they need us as much as we need them. We are really excited to provide those things. We have added several new services for families. We have family passes that they can now check out to the Indiana State Museum, the Indiana State Parks and to Connor Prairie. We are working with the Rural Dimension Network to provide memory kits for adults that may be experiencing dementia and Alzheimer's. We are also partnering with the Hoosier Hills Food Bank. We volunteer with them, but we also have intentions of helping create recipe cards for those food boxes that they give out, but then also use that menu of items that they give out to create food programming within the library and sort of invite all families of what can you make with those food items without necessarily calling out if people are getting them from the food bank. Just a way to reach families where they are at is a large part of what we do. Everything we do for the community is free, therefore allowing every dollar that they would spend with those services to go back into the local economy rather than on the books and the internet and the passes and all of those things that we provide by sharing it with the community. We believe that this does make for a stronger community, so today we are, again, introducing this need for this bond to conserve the history of our building while improving the structural integrity of it, and I today also have with me our architect that did a facility assessment of Mitchell last fall, Stephen Allen with Architectural Revivalist. Good evening, everyone. Good are you? My name is Stephen Allen. I'm an architect and preservation specialist based out of Indianapolis and my work centers around historic buildings, typically, and so we were contacted last year by the board for Mitchell Community Public Library, and we completed an assessment of the building, a beautiful Carnegie Library, as you guys know, that was built in Mitchell. There are treasures around Indiana that we really need to try to maintain and keep for as long as we can, because other buildings are never going to come like that again. We're probably not going to get Andrew Carnegie's again giving me libraries, so anyway. We completed an assessment of the proc of the building. The last time an assessment was completed was 2011. The last time any renovation work was completed there was back in 2014, with most major systems being actually installed back in 1994 when the addition was put on to the original Carnegie Library. Most of the mechanical systems are installed at that time, that's kind of the last time that any, really, any of that exterior envelope that we live in looked at. There's been some winter replacement over the years and things, you know, roof, things like that, but what they're running into right now is some, as water is really, as we all know, the biggest enemy of buildings. It's been almost 30 years since that building that addition was built. Unfortunately, the addition itself is probably less structurally sound than the original early 1900s building, but there are some foundation issues that are happening that we've got a few cracks, probably from some settlement. We need to get the site, the drainage moving away from the building, creating positive drainage. There's some site work included, really, as Allison was saying, it is really to, so basically so let me get back to this, during this assessment, we actually, our team put together a list of items for their team to consider as most important crucial items for the maintenance of their building, and so what we're kind of attacking are those high level and some of those mid-level items, and those included the HVAC system, renewals are now 30 years old at the end of their life, the parking lots are worn, they're at the end of their lives, there's some site work, there's additional things as well that I could list off as well if you need to, but they're really trying to just make sure that they're preserving what they have. So, based on those recommendations from architectural rivals that have included a summary of that list for you, some of those high and medium key items, I believe the high items are listed as one to two years, please keep in mind, too, that this assessment was done a year ago, so we're already, that timeline has moved up as well, and those are the things that we're