Politics & Government

Parkland Library Ballot Question Defeated

Voters oppose raising taxes to finance construction of new library in Upper Macungie Township.

A ballot question asking Parkland School District voters to pay an additional tax to help finance a new $13 million library went down in defeat at the ballot box Tuesday.

That means property owners will continue to pay .1 mills in library tax—about $22 a year for the average school district homeowner—and not the .2978 mills that the library board requested.

The ballot question was defeated by more than 1,600 votes, or 18 percent, according to unofficial Lehigh County Election Bureau totals. The unofficial tally was 5,502 votes against raising the library tax and 3,825 votes in favor.

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The additional tax would have meant an additional $44 a year for the average district taxpayer whose property value is assessed at $221,000.

The tax would have been used to pay a loan of about $9 million to build a new 30,000-square-foot library on Grange Road in Upper Macungie Township.

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The library had already saved about a quarter of the planned cost of construction.

Karl Siebert, the chairman of the Parkland Community Library board of directors, told The Morning Call that the defeat is a setback for the project, but that the plans for a new library—years in the making—will not necessarily be scuttled.

The library board held five town hall meetings around the school district in advance of the election to field questions about the project, but few people showed.

As planned, the new library would be more than five times the size of the existing library on Walbert Avenue in South Whitehall Township, which was built in 1981 and is no longer big enough to suit the community’s needs, according to the library board.

Nonetheless, the board planned to keep the Walbert Avenue location open for limited hours to serve patrons in South Whitehall.

A new library would mean patrons would no longer have to wait at least four weeks for best sellers because of a lack of space and that 7,000 volumes currently held in storage would be put on the shelves.

The children’s section of the new library would be roughly the same size as the current library and would, for the first time, include young adult titles.


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