Title
Review of current Community Room Policy and discussion of after-hours meetings
Body
RECOMMENDED ACTION (Motion):
Provide guidance for fair practices for opening after-hours for groups, such as neighborhood associations, requesting Community Room reservation
BACKGROUND:
The Community Room Policy ('Policy", attached) allows the Director to decide when groups can reserve the Community Room after-hours; however, the Policy provides no criteria for making that decision. To date, other than other City Departments and library programs, the main groups which have been allowed to meet after-hours are the McLoughlin Neighborhood Association (MNA) and local representative, Mark Meek. MNA's requests started as one-off requests back when the library reopened in its new space then grew to encompass all of its meetings, which number about 5-6 a year. They had lost their previous space, and the library was in the MNA neighborhood. Not a lot of deep thinking went into these decisions. The Library Director and Library Manager stayed for these meetings so that other staff schedules were not impacted.
Then the Canemah Neighborhood Association (CNA) lost it's meeting space at the Police Department. They requested library space and were turned down. Of course, this was unfair. At the time, however, we were realizing that approving CNA's after-hours meeting could lead to many more neighborhood association requests. Our thoughts were on the staffing and we saw where this could quickly become unsustainable.
I offer apologies to CNA for treating them differently than MNA.
Our Community Room space and entrances were designed in the hopes that the space could be used without staff assistance after-hours. In reality, the distance from the Community Room to the sliding entry doors make it impossible to oversee who comes into the building. Because we have had many behavior and restroom problems, library management is not comfortable allowing people to use the Community Room with...
Click here for full text