By Elizabeth Wulfhorst
TINTON FALLS – After securing a $217,500 grant from the New Jersey Library Construction Bond Act, the Tinton Falls Public Library Association hopes to begin making repairs soon to a library building that has been shuttered for over five years.
No one has been in the building on Tinton Avenue since August 2017 when an air quality assessment found mold in an attached trailer. The borough, which owns the building and the land, closed and locked the doors immediately with most of the books and furnishings in place.
At its Dec. 6 meeting the borough council approved a resolution to award Settembrino Architects the contract for architectural services related to the library renovation. That approval, in addition to the grant funding – supplemented by $150,000 from the borough and money the association has raised – means the borough can take the first step in a long process to reopen the library: mold remediation.
Once the mold issue is rectified, the next step will be removing all the “soft” items from the building, including the books. “In the interest of health,” all of the books will be “trashed,” explained Linda Cicalese, library association board member.
“I can’t tell you how painful that is for people that read,” she said.
Anything else that isn’t a hard surface – upholstered chairs, carpeting – will also be disposed of and any remaining items sanitized. Once the library reopens it will have a smaller footprint than before, as the attached trailer – ground zero for the offending mold – will be removed and not replaced.
At a meeting last week of the library association, Heidi Amici, assistant library director for the Monmouth County Library System (MCLS), offered insight into what the association could expect during the reopening process. The Tinton Falls Public Library is a private library run by the association, which leases the building from the borough; the borough pays county library taxes so the library can be a member of the county system. Any resident of Tinton Falls can obtain a county library card for free and borrow items from any MCLS branch. Once the Tinton Falls Library reopens, residents will still be able to hold a county library card, in addition to a Tinton Falls Library card.
MCLS member status also means the library can expect some help replenishing its book stock, but not enough to fill the shelves. Notably, during the meeting, Amici gave the association interesting insight into the library’s circulation when it was open. “She told us that half of our circulation was children’s books,” Cicalese said.
“I knew that our children’s reading program was very well attended and people were very enthusiastic about it,” she said, but was surprised by the numbers.
“Heidi suggested that, when we initially open, that we really focus on our strengths, which was children’s and also leisure reading for adults,” she added.
The association is entitled to money annually through the county to buy books but, because of lack of storage, it will lose 2022’s stipend. “We’re very frustrated because we’ve got a budget that we can buy books through the county and we actually would have had till the end of this month to buy books, but we have nowhere to store them if we did.” The county is undergoing construction at its headquarters so it can’t help with storage. When asked if Tinton Falls Borough Hall had any room to store books until the library’s reopening, Cicalese said they were waiting to hear from the borough but held out little hope. “We’re kind of low on their priority list,” she said.
“It’s gone,” Cicalese said of this year’s money, lamenting a lost opportunity.
Staffing the library could pose another problem. While all of the former staff has moved on to other jobs, the association is hopeful a few may return. “The hope is that we can get at least a couple of them to come back because they are familiar with the operation and we’re familiar with them. In other words, we know what we’re getting there,” she said. Initially they will rely heavily on volunteers.
The association was founded in 1961. When open, the library is supported by the association through some investments, a yearly book sale and two fundraisers – a children’s fashion show slated for March 25 next year and a summer music festival. It also receives “an annual municipal budget appropriation of $143,000 per year for operating expenses,” said Thomas P. Fallon, the chief financial officer, director of audit accounts and control, and acting borough administrator for the Borough of Tinton Falls, during an earlier interview. Those monies cover payroll and other expenses like electricity, telephones and costs associated with running the library.
The association also accepts direct donations through its website tintonfallslibray.com and participates in the AmazonSmile charitable giving program.
The article originally appeared in the December 15 – 21, 2022 print edition of The Two River Times.
