Renton officials continue Friday to work on library options
Published 4:52 pm Friday, April 6, 2012
Renton city officials and staff continued to work Friday on options that would give the public some role in the location of a downtown Renton library.
The goal is to have a proposal to present to the Renton City Council Monday night, a task that could fall to council President Rich Zwicker or Mayor Denis Law.
The agenda for the Monday night council meeting posted online at rentonwa.gov does not mention the library. The meeting starts at 7 p.m. in the council’s chambers on the seventh floor of City Hall.
“The reason there isn’t something more specific is that it’s still in process,” said city spokesman Kelley Balcomb-Bartok Friday afternoon.
Meetings have been under way since Tuesday at City Hall, the day after the City Council voted 4-3 to decline to place an initiative on the ballot that would require that any money dedicated for a downtown library pay for improvements to the existing library over the Cedar River.
If the money was to be used to build another library downtown, then the public would get to choose the library location, under the initiative.
The citizens’ group and some council members argued there was confusion leading up to the vote that eventually approved annexing to the King County Library System about the fate of the city’s two existing libraries.Many have said they wouldn’t have voted to annex to KCLS had they known the library on the Cedar would no longer exist.
The explanatory statement in the voters pamphlet for the February 2010 annexation election states: “Renton would provide two replacement library facilities to be paid for at a future date by City of Renton funds.”
The pamphlet also included a rebuttal, written by annexation opponents, to the statement in favor of annexing to KCLS. One of the reasons: “Under KCLS annexation, Renton Library will be moved and Renton residents will pay for replacement facilities.”
Zwicker approached city administrators Tuesday morning to figure out a way to engage the public in the library location process, following Monday night’s emotional council meeting.
Zwicker was one of four council members who voted against moving the initiative forward. He maintained the initiative is unconstitutional.
The city must find a way to engage the public and still meet its contractual obligations with KCLS to build the libraries.
A number of options are on the table, according to Balcomb-Bartok, including giving voters a chance to vote on the library’s location. City Attorney Larry Warren said Wednesday that no decision had been made whether the vote would be advisory or binding.
The city has spoken “a number of times” this week with officials from the KCLS, said Balcomb-Bartok.
KCLS officials said mid-week they were just waiting to see where the City of Renton was going after the week’s developments.
“I have no idea what the implications are at this time,” Bill Ptacek, KCLS director, said Wednesday. “I thought we were on the same page, but I guess not.” Saying that it was hard to comment, Ptacek did not know if any development plans would stop on the downtown library or the new Highlands branch.
Warren said Wednesday that city “will have to sit down with KCLS and decide how we can satisfy them, if we can.”
Warren, who called the initiative “fatally flawed” in a March 5 memorandum to the mayor, City Council and other administrators, told council members they had four options before them to handle the initiative. They could adopt it as is, put it to a vote of the people, refuse to act on it because of illegality or change the language and adopt it.
But Richard Stephens, the attorney representing the citizens’ initiative group, contends council members only had two options before them. Stephens cites state law that says the council must either approve the initiative as written or place it on the ballot to let the voters decide to set a new policy on library development.
Warren agrees that the action the council took is not part of the initiative process outlined in the Revised Code of Washington, the codification of all state laws.
Normally, those rules would apply, he said. “This is not a normal situation,” he said Wednesday.
There’s another law of the land in play, the Constitution.The city cannot “impair a contract,” he said, which he argues that either option in the initiative would do.
To do so, he said, is unconstitutional, which is the reasoning for his recommendation that the council not allow the initiative to move forward.
The citizens group had collected 6,383 signatures, enough valid signatures to put the matter before the City Council for further action.
