Changes at the Timberland Naselle Library are a source of back-and-forth assertions.

An open letter to the Board of Trustees of Timberland Regional Library in regards the pending removal of librarians from Naselle Library:

A library without a librarian is like a school without teachers, an airplane without a pilot, or an orchestra without a conductor. It is like an automat compared to a cozy cafe or a fine restaurant. A family doctor with no face.

The cold and peremptory decision of the Board of Timberland Regional Library to suddenly deprive the people of Naselle and its surrounding district of live librarians is both sickening and despicable. For a public body that claims to represent its region and derives both its authority and funding from local taxing districts — that is, the local people — to abridge their services in such a radical way, with no consultation of those very people, is both tone-deaf and mean-spirited. Withholding promised services from taxpaying library card holders is also arguably illegal, or at the very least deeply improper. By no measure or justification can it be considered sound stewardship or in good faith.

First the so-called local Bank of the Pacific forsook Naselle and Gray’s River, then the Department of Children, Youth and Families closed Naselle Youth Camp, and now Timberland Regional Library has first deep-sixed the stacks and now the librarians themselves. This is how a small town withers and dies: death by a thousand cuts. All these decisions were reprehensible and short-sighted, but at least the bank is a for-profit business, whereas Timberland has no such excuse — it is a nonprofit public service. How can they possibly reconcile cutting out the beating heart of the very service they tax the people to maintain and protect? Or take considerable fees from those of us card-holders who live outside the library district? And then claim that the euphemistically named “expanded hours” will somehow make up for it? This is bald-faced bait-and-switch of the lowest order. “Mendacity, mendacity, mendacity!”, as Big Daddy says in Tennessee Williams’s “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”: “There ain’t nuthin’ more powerful than the odor of mendacity.” This ploy reads to any library-loving observer as nothing but a feeble attempt to back up a budget raid in favor of questionable objectives: corporate culture at its worst brought to bear upon the public weal at its best. It is, in a word, a promise broken.

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This ploy reads to any library-loving observer as nothing but a feeble attempt to back up a budget raid in favor of questionable objectives: corporate culture at its worst brought to bear upon the public weal at its best. It is, in a word, a promise broken.

TRL dares to justify their betrayal of its “customers” by blaming it on low circulation numbers, compared to other branches. Duh! We are a small community of fewer than a thousand souls. Does that make any one of them less in her, his, or their needs and expectations than a cardholder in Olympia?

Why did TRL come into such a community in the first place, and build a beautiful facility, if only to abandon it when circulation numbers don’t rise to their urban expectations? The people of Naselle and vicinity love their library, sustain a modest but vibrant book culture, and have given much in return through the Friends of Naselle Library in terms of landscaping, book sales (most recently, just prior to this sour announcement), and in many other volunteer capacities. Is it any wonder that their comments of their Facebook page and elsewhere reflect a deep sense of disappointment, betrayal, and lost trust?

Timberland doesn’t have to make every facility “pay their way” at equivalent rates of circulation. We do so in other ways, through taxes and fees, volunteer hours, and sheer pride in the library. TRL spends hundreds of thousands on technological innovations and other gimcracks that few want anywhere near as much as they want books — stacks and all — and a real-life librarian with her knowledge, cheerful helpfulness, kind face, and essential human presence. Sally, Ann, Michelle, Sherry, Marsha, Ernestine, all the other beloved librarians who have worked here over the years or in any library: for TRL to presume to say that they can be somehow replaced by a key-fob and a dark, silent building, and then to present it as an actual advance, is a wet slap in the face to all librarians everywhere. Come on, Timberland — what are you even thinking? How stupid do you think we are — and of what little value?

An Aug. 29, 2024 TRL press release states that “by reducing time spent on routine in-branch tasks, staff can now focus more on outreach initiatives such as visiting schools, childcare facilities, local food banks, and community events.” As the poet Gary Snyder might put it, “this is all good work — but it is not your work.” Your work is to provide libraries in the timber-based counties of Washington, to care for them, and then staff them adequately and suitably — with librarians, not with laser sensors and key fobs. It is obvious to all that you are not cutting out librarians in order to solve the social problems of the wider community — you are doing it to cut staff costs and jobs, just as the supermarkets install self-serve kiosks not to serve consumers, but to increase profits. We all know that the more work can be digitized, the fewer staff need to be hired. As a friend of mine called it, “carving the humanity out of the culture.” There is no need or call for TRL to slavishly follow such an inhumane imperative.

As a life-long reader and library-user for whom librarians have meant as much in my education and growth as a person as my teachers did; as a card-carrying, fee-paying member of the Naselle Library from its start, and a 46-year resident of the community it serves; and as an author with many of my books in circulation in the TRL system, who has given dozens programs in several branches and at TRL headquarters back before they suffered mission drift, I expected better of them. Much better.

A devotional poem of mine, “The Librarians,” which I have shared with dozens of librarians and which hangs on the wall of the Longview Public Library, concludes: “Not until the last librarian is gone, will I give up.” And now that will have come to pass, at least in Naselle, unless the TRL Board revisits and reverses this dreadful decision. I hope all who share my heartsickness over it will flood the TRL director and trustees with their concerted insistence that they withdraw their prior edict, or at the very least suspend it to give time for public consultation, discussion in the community, and reconsideration.

As soon as possible, please write the TRL Board of Trustees at TRLBoardofTrustees@trl.org and TRL’s director at LibraryDirector@trl.org.