Try to keep up as we outline what users of the Deschutes Public Library are going to experience in the coming years. As we outlined in a news story last week, DPL is in the midst of building its big new "Central Library" on the far-east side of Bend – a location selected secondarily, after the Bend City Council rejected DPL's plan to put that Central Library in a far more central location, a stone's throw from the new Costco and the Deschutes County Sheriff's Office. But even before that new library is done, DPL will close its existing branch library on the east side. When facing down the prospect of signing a two- or five-year lease on that space, DPL opted to end that service, leaving, for a time, the library in downtown Bend as its only option in the county's biggest city.
But wait – don't get too comfy with that downtown branch, because once the new, east-side Central Library is up and running, the downtown branch will close for up to a year, library officials told the Source Weekly, so that it can undergo a major renovation.
Along the way, this editorial board has done its best to support the mission of the library. We got on board with the location near the sheriff's office before the lack of a master plan shut that down. We managed to wrap our heads around the fact that a big library with a sorting facility for all of DPL's facilities to use was the right move, rather than smaller branch libraries dotted around the towns — and then accepted that a site on the east side was the only place left to put it. And we still believe we have some of the best library systems one could hope for.
Yet, one has to wonder how some of these upcoming moves are going to affect those for whom the library is not just a fun place to grab reading materials, but a literal lifeline. The downtown branch serves not just as a place for people to learn something new, but as a warming shelter, a cooling shelter, a place to apply for jobs and housing. When the downtown branch closes for a year, DPL officials told us they'll find some way to keep service going there during the renovation. But given the many ways the library is used by our region's most vulnerable, it would be nice at this juncture to know more about what that actually looks like. Will it be a place merely to drop off books and pick up ones you put on hold, or will it offer an indoor space where some of the services that provide logistical support will also be available? Is there some portion of the downtown library's building complex — which includes not only the bigger main building but also the older office buildings to the south of that — that can be used to keep some services in place? If services are at a bare minimum, what will the transportation options look like for getting to the Central Library out east?
We have no doubt that the Deschutes Public Library takes its mission to serve the entire community seriously. Right now, it's not entirely clear what services will look like during the transition years between having one smaller and one larger Bend library, to having two big Bend libraries, and we get that it takes time to figure all that out. But while they're contemplating, we'd argue that services in downtown Bend are just too important to keep at a minimum. It's going to be an inconvenience for lots of people to have to travel to the farthest reaches of Bend to get library services during this transition, but that trek will be more significant for the people who need the library the most. While we're in this middle space, let's try to maintain the downtown library as the lifeline that it is.
