Not sure why the level of discourse at last night’s city meeting about closing Main Library seemed so high and lively. Maybe it had something to do with the topic, which hinged on our access to knowledge–and with the fact that the discussion took place just a few feet away from hundreds of classic works of literature.

Assistant City Manager Suzanne Frick seemed to know what lay ahead as the meeting got under way. (Minutes before, the Long Beach Public Library Foundation’s Sara Pillet told me that pro-library groups have collected more than 4,000 signatures in favor of keeping it open.)

“We know this is a very heated issue in the community,” Frick said, asking spectators to please sit on their hands until the night was over. (They didn’t obey, applauding periodically throughout–and again at the end, at Frick’s urging.)

“I am frankly outraged and I am embarrassed that so little planning has gone into this,” said former 15-year Director of Library Services Cordelia Howard, questioning the proposal’s timing. Howard, who held the post from 1983 to 1998, wasn’t alone.

“It just looks like we’re balancing the budget on the backs of the users of the Main Library,” said resident Tom Paradise, referring to the estimated $1.8 million the city may save in the Fiscal Year 2008-2009 budget if it approves closing Main Library.

Resident Claire Carsman evoked the memory of her late husband John Carlyle Crews, who perished in last year’s Galaxy Towers fire in Bluff Park. Crews didn’t have a will, Carsman told The District Weekly, noting that when she asked him what they should do about that, he suggested she just give his money to the library.

“If that library closes, that endowment disappears,” Carsman said emphatically, valuing the sum at a quarter of a million dollars. “The mayor wants to blackmail the city with his bond issue, well, I can blackmail too.”

Attorney Cheryl Avirom waxed somewhat philosophical, when she asked the crowd, “What does it say to the rest of the world about Long Beach, that we’re going to close our Main Library?”

That’s very much the same argument which Long Beach Museum of Art supporters have made in defense of the museum, which faces a $3.1 million construction bond debt due in September 2009: that Long Beach intellectual and social life will lose something without an art museum.

But last night was the first time I’ve heard someone make a similar argument in support of Main Library.

The library’s downstairs auditorium was packed, but not entirely full, for an hour-and-fifteen-minutes meeting that wound up going an hour into overtime as residents, current and former library officials, one former mayoral candidate and even a contributor to LBPost.com voiced their thoughts on what should become of Main Library.

As they’ve been doing in public for nearly a month, city officials again noted that the building, which opened in 1977, has seismic problems, according to a 2007 city survey. It leaks copiously (true), and is just plain unappetizing (also rather true).

“It is essentially undefinable and unidentifiable from the street,” Public Works Director Mike Conway said. “You can walk by it and not realize there’s a library there.”

Fixing the roof instead of doing what the city wants–which is to open a satellite Main Library elsewhere downtown, close this library, and then build a new Main Library of undetermined size somewhere in the city–amounts to putting “scarce resources into a Band-Aid issue to keep our dying building alive,” Conway said.

But, as the city’s Director of Community Development Dennis Thys pointed out while enumerating possible satellite locations, “We do not have a site in mind. We are still assessing different locations. If the City Council adopts the budget in September, that will start the process of selecting a site.”

There’s also the money problem. Several of the more than a dozen animated speakers reminded the city that there’s still no guaranteed main funding source for a new Main Library, which currently bears a $26 million price tag.

Mayor Bob Foster says $8 million of that could come from the Redevelopment Agency. The other $18 million would be earmarked for the library, according to Mayor Foster, in his proposed $571 million infrastructure bond, which will be on the November ballot as Proposition I.

What happens if that doesn’t pass? City staffers say if Proposition I fails, we’ll still get a new Main Library–we just may not get it quite as quickly. (That didn’t please at least one speaker, who reminded the crowd that our original Mark Twain Library was also a temporary library–for 49 years.)

Last night, city staffers also reiterated their pledge that this Main Library will remain open until a satellite library is up and running. Thys said that after the City Council approves a new city budget–with plans to eventually close the library–the library issue might then return to Council in November or December for an update.

The vast majority of residents who spoke last night were against closing Main Library, and their suggestions included the possibility of turning its moribund rooftop garden into a drought-tolerant xeriscape fragrant with sage.

Other speakers, however, poked and prodded the undefinable: what they characterized as a pervasive civic climate of unease and mistrust, which darkens when issues such as this are thrust suddenly to the fore.

“These things create in the public’s mind this climate of mistrust,” said resident Maureen Habel, who’s leaning in favor of the infrastructure bond. “I don’t know anybody else besides me who wants to vote for this [bond] right now.”

“To do this on an emergency basis without the emergency being proven, this is politics at its worst,” said Avirom, questioning whether the building’s leaks and potential seismic hazards couldn’t simply be mitigated. “I think we need more research and this needs to stay.”

Tags: $571 million infrastructure bond, Assistant City Manager Suzanne Frick, Bluff Park, California, Cheryl Avirom, Claire Carsman, Cordelia Howard, Director of Community Development Dennis Thys, First District Councilwoman Bonnie Lowenthal, Fiscal Year 2008-2009 budget, Galaxy Towers fire, John Carlyle Crews, LBPost.com, Long Beach, Long Beach City Council, long beach museum of art, Long Beach Public Library Foundation, Main Library closure, Mark Twain library, Maureen Habel, Mayor Bob Foster, Prop. I, Proposition I, Public Works Director Mike Conway, Redevelopment Agency, Sara Pillet, Southern California, The District Weekly, Theo Douglas, Tom Paradise