And good morning, good morning, good morning, and welcome, welcome, welcome. It is time now for our City Matters programming. If it matters to you, it matters to the city, at least it should. Anyway, We've got our assemble to crew here today and Laura Sanders is the assistant city manager. What do we have going on today, young lady.
Morning.
Yeah, lot's going on.
So just because it's a holiday week doesn't mean that things slow down for us.
We were like.
The energizer bunnies. It just keeps going and going and going. And so this week we do have some different schedules for the holidays, so most city offices will be closed on December twenty fifth and December twenty sixth, and then also again on January first and recognition of Christmas, and
then the New Year's holidays. We are told that residential routes will not be impacted by this because both the Christmas holiday and the New Year's holiday fall on Wednesday, and that is not They don't run on Wednesdays anyway, so it's not impacted.
This is great. You get them bones and ribbons and everything disposed of.
Due time exactly, so every other thing's business as normal on both of those weeks. I was told that the commercial routes will be serviced on a different day because we still service commercial routes on Wednesdays, So those will be on December twenty fourth and December thirty first instead of on Wednesday. Okay, so we've got that going, and I do want to give an update because this has
kind of been a hot topic. We've got our police department is hosting a flock safety forum and so that is on January sixteenth, and we ask all citizens to mark their calendars and plan to attend at six pm January sixteenth. It will be at the Oakwoo Lion Hall. They're on twenty two to oh one Silver Lake Road in Bartlesville. And if they have specific questions that they have, they can submit them ahead of time to bpd Q and A at Cityofbartlesville dot org and so you'll see
that information coming out there. If you don't have CITYBAT, I would encourage residents to subscribe to City Beat because that's where you can get your information, and all of this information is out there as well. So if you go to our website at Cityofbartlesville dot org and put in your name and your email address. You will have city information sent to you weekly, so we do encourage
people to do that. I'm going to pass it on to Kylie, she is our library and history museum director, and we're going to talk about the history of the library for those that don't have it.
Thank you. Yeah, so very exciting stuff.
I know the history of the library, but it is exciting because Bartlesville's library is actually has a very robust history starting all the way back to eighteen ninety eight. So in June of eighteen ninety eight, Bartlesville established its first ever reading room by the Fortnightly Club, which was later known as the Tuesday Club, and it was in a storefront on East Second Street.
Then in nineteen eight, the renamed.
Tuesday Club public library room was open on Fridays from two pm to five thirty pm, so not a ton of time in that reading room, but it was available to the public, and the city decided to begin funding that with a maintenance fund of just two thousand dollars so, which.
In that time was a lot of money to.
Be able to afford books and materials in nineteen oh eight. Also in November of that year, the Bartlesville City Commission decided to request a twenty thousand dollars grant from the Carnegie Foundation for a library building, which we all know the Carnegie Foundation is who built most libraries in the United States. And then in January of nineteen oh nine, seventh and O. Sage was selected as the new library site. The owners of that site were the Pembertons, and they
donated two thirds of that land. It was eighteen hundred square feet and the donation was accepted by the city.
And then in nineteen twelve, funding for the new library building was secured and contracts were signed for the construction of the new building, and twelve thousand, eight hundred of that came from the Carnegie grant, so we did not receive the full twenty thousand, but we did receive twelve thousand of that, which was significant, and through other private donations they were able to establish that first public library building.
In March of nineteen thirteen, the Bartlesville Carnegie Library was opened and the library contained twelve hundred books.
Twelve hundred.
I will tell you what our now number is later on, but twelve hundred, which was a good number back then. And Miss Mabel blake Sey was the librarian who was our first librarian of our first established Bartlesville Public Library. In between nineteen sixteen and nineteen nineteen, Miss Myrtle Weatherhold was the librarian her annual book report.
So every year, the once.
You're established as a state library, a public library of the state of Oklahoma, you have to report your annual statistics to the Oklahoum Department of Libraries.
So that was the first year that we.
In nineteen nineteen was the first year that we were able to submit those reports. And at that time we submitted that there was a circulation of fourteen thousand, so fourteen thousand items checked out over that time period, we had fifteen hundred people with library cards in the area, and we had two cataloged books in the collection, so we had gone up just a little bit.
In nineteen nineteen, Miss.
Ruth Brown was hired as librarian of the Barlsvil Public Library and she held onto that position until nineteen fifty. Miss Ruth Brown was very famous in the library community and just in history overall. And we'll talk about why here in a minute. But while she was the head librarian, the Bartlesvil City Commission and the Library Board decided to move the library to the north wing of the Civic Center in addition to the East wing east.
Side of the wing.
It was approved by the City Commission in nineteen thirty one, and now the library contained twenty five thousand volumes, So we went up from two thousand to twenty five thousand in just a matter of you know, twenty years. And then in nineteen fifty, Miss Ruth Brown was accused of purchasing communist materials for the library and promoting integration, which was still very new at the time, and the City
Commission asked that the library board fire Miss Brown. When they refused to do so, the city Council dismissed the board and fired Miss Brown on July twenty fifth, nineteen fifty, and a new library board was then appointed. So as a result of that accusation, the American Library Association's Intellectual Freedom Committee began working with Miss Brown. In addition, the Oklahoma chapter of that committee was created as a direct result of her case and then partially due to its
timing during the height of the McCarthy era. The case received national attention and later a movie based on Brown's experience was made called Storm Center, and it starred by Davis, which you can check out from the library if you're interested in learning more about that. And then this is actually very interesting because I just received a call last week from the historic Circle Cinema that's located in Tulsa.
They're going to be doing a new documentary the spring that will play at the Circle Cinema regarding public libraries in Oklahoma, and the Ruth Brown case specifically will be highlighted there with some new input from the American Library Association and people who held office and things. There will be some interviews included in that, and they have reached out to our library to ask us to be a
part of it, so we're really happy about that. In nineteen fifty one, according to the new City Charter, the library became an administrative department of the city and it was subject to control the Library Board of six residents. And then in nineteen fifty three, Herbert gene Winn was hired as the lead library and then served until nineteen eighty three. In nineteen fifty seven, so it was another
year that we reported statistics to the state. Our circulation had gone up to one hundred and twenty thousand, and we had thirteen thousand, seven hundred library cardholders at that point, so a very steep increase. You can start to see as the timeline goes on, more and more people beginning to see the value of their public library here in Bartles Zone. In nineteen sixty, after failing twice, a bond election passed for the rebuilding of the enlarged and enlarging
the library. In nineteen sixty October of that year, the Eticquotte Foundation extended a twenty thousand dollars grant for a self development center to be placed inside the library. The center contained a fine arts room, a reading lounge, and a information room. In nineteen sixty one, the Frank Phillips Foundation issued thirty five thousand dollars to refurbish the American Legion Room above the library into a community history room, and then in nineteen sixty two that same foundation gave
another fifteen thousand to furnish the history room. Then in nineteen sixty four, so two years after that we actually were able to open history room, which now has become the History Museum, which is located in City Hall. In nineteen eighty seven, plans began for a new library facility. Nineteen eighty eight, the newly appointed Library Trust Authority took its first oath of office and was charged to design, build,
and equip and maintain our public library. So in nineteen eighty nine, ceremonies to kick off the Build a Brighter Tomorrow campaign were held at the library. A bond election was held for the new library facility, and the bond called for the demolition of the old library and the Civic Center and the construction of a new library on the existing site. The project cost total four million dollars. Of the costs, one point five million was private donations.
And the election passed pretty well.
In nineteen ninety demolition began of the old library and the Civic Center, and then in nineteen ninety one, groundbreaking ceremonies began for the new.
Library, the SI Facility, which is the library that we have today.
In nineteen ninety two, the new Barlsville Public Library and History Museum it was still combined at that time, opened its doors to the public with a crowd of more than twenty five hundred in attendance. The building was designed by the firm mccroy Olsen Coffee Association and mister mccroy's final project It was his final project before he retired as an architect. In nineteen ninety seven, access to the
Internet was made available can you believe it? I know, in nineteen ninety seven, and then in April of ninety seven, we granted full graphic access to the World Wide Web and made six public terminals available where people could come in and actually surf the Internet in nineteen ninety seven.
Which is a really big deal back then.
It was yes that year our annual report to the Oklahoma Department of Libraries saw that we had a circulation of three hundred and eighty two thousand items, Our total number of library cardholders were twenty seven thousand, and the collection size had gone up to ninety two thousand.
Materials in the collection.
So again, just continued growth, continued growth, and a lot of that really came from those private donations for people who started to see the number of library cardholders increasing in our city and believing that education was so important and access was so important, and began giving back. In spring of two thousand, the Bartlesville Area History Museum moved into its permanent quarters that the Phillips Annex. The library was awarded a Heismith Award for Outstanding Library program from
the American Library Association. In twenty fifteen, we circulated four hundred and sixty seven thousand items and hosted forty four hundred and eighty eight programs with twelve thousand, five hundred people in attendance. So that was really the time frame where libraries started to become more than just a place to check out materials and to have books and do research, but a place where people could come and meet, to gather, to have programming, and to spend time with each other
and be really a community hub. In March of twenty sixteen, a third meeting room was added to accommodate all of the groups and organizations that want to meet at our library, which is still extremely busy with meeting room groups. In twenty seventeen, a laptop bar was installed for the teens, so we went from ninety seven just having the internet to now bringing in laptops and Wi Fi and all
those things. In twenty eighteen, our Library of Things collection was installed, which we've talked about here before, but items like sewing machines, telescopes, laminators, and musical instruments can now be checked out from the library. Eighteen thanks to a health literacy grant. The library now offers exercise classes, taichi and yoga classes year round. In twenty nineteen, a grant from Kannico Phillips created the Creative Corner, which has art
supplies for crafters and teachers. And then in twenty twenty we had to close, like everybody had to close to the public due to the COVID nineteen pandemic. We started curbside right after that so people could come by and still check out materials. So there was that, you know, spatial awareness during all of that time, and we opened for limited services in June of twenty twenty. But today our library is thriving, and I'll give you a couple of updates. We just talked about all of those numbers.
This is what our numbers look like today in twenty twenty four. So three thirty six, three hundred and ten people have library cards today, which is pretty incredible when you take the actual population of Bartlesville is about thirty six thousand people. That means that our library services communities outside of just Bartlesville. You can pay to have a
guest pass at our library. It's a yearly cost, and then people from outside of Bartlesville can also use our library services if they don't have libraries in their communities. One hundred and sixty two thousand, six hundred and eighty two people.
Walked through our doors last year.
That comes out to approximately forty eight people entering the library every single hour, So every hour that we're opened, there's about fifty people coming in and out of the library. Our collection contains eighty two thousand physical items and we saw a total circulation of four hundred and twenty thousand
checkouts last year, which is really incredible. One hundred and eighty five thousand of those were e materials, So after the pandemic, we really put a lot of focus into having audiobooks, music, e reading, all of that available on line so that people had another avenue of accessing materials and learning.
Also, our database collection.
Is online as well, and that has been a trend that just continues to grow and grow. We also lend items to other libraries. Last year we lent out two hundred two thousand and four items to other libraries and we only requested two hundred and fifty six items.
So we're part of a.
Consortium where people from other communities, other states, even if they're looking for a particular item, they can go onto the consortium website, see that Bartlesville has that item, and they pay a fee and then that item gets sent out to them. Our customers can also do that. It's a way of just extending our collection beyond.
The walls of Bartlesville Public Library.
If we don't have something in our collection, a lot of times you can go on to our lending platform and find that and have it sent to you here in Bartlesville. In two thousand and twenty four, we also saw twenty thousand logins on our public computers and seventy two thousand Wi Fi sessions. So that's just kind of telling us that the computers are still important to have in place, but a lot of people are bringing in their own personal devices and we see that a lot.
We have a lot of people who do.
Remote work from the library, do remote school from the library, and they come in. We have lots of meeting spaces, lots of quiet rooms where they can sit down with their laptops, their phones and tablets and complete work that needs.
To get done.
We also hosted six hundred and fourteen programs with more than eighteen thousand people in attendance last year, some big numbers, especially for our library our size. We have a thriving literacy department with one hundred and thirteen active learners working with literacy tutors in our community.
Many of these.
Learners have gone on to pass their GED programs to get driver's license or other certificates, and even US citizenship. We've helped people work through their citizenship testing so that they can become voters in our community.
And we have a seed library.
We can come and check out seeds for your garden, and then once you've used up those seeds and you've grown incredible, delicious vegetables and wonderful plants, you can drive those seeds out and return them to your library the next season and we'll put them back into the collection and they just get reused and recycled and we continue to buy new seeds for that lending program. Like I said, we have a library of things, We have a three D printer, We offer exercise classes, weekly story.
Times, so much more.
And now we are at the point where we're looking at what's going to be our next three to five years. And so that's the next thing I want to talk about is our strategic planning. So the strategic plan currently for the library ends this January, So we want to know what the public wants to see.
This library has adapted.
From a teeny tiny reading room in a small storefront to an incredible thriving organization today, and we want to know what the next three to five years are going to look like. So we have a survey that's available on our Facebook page, which is you can just search Bartles of the Library on Facebook.
It'll come up.
It's pinned right there to the top. You can log in, you can take the survey. It takes five minutes.
It's only ten.
Questions, and it really digs into what are some things that interest you, What are things that you think would be beneficial to our community. What are ways that we can grow and continue to adapt to our community needs.
You still have that card catalog desk?
We have one with one. It's inactive.
It's really more just for show, but it has all the death notices and it is in our local history section.
I have to tell the kids and grandkids that was my search engine.
Yeah, it is still pretty cool for historical purposes. You got to keep one.
Yeah, they call it hysterical because that happens.
But that's the history of our incredible library. It's good to see the history of it.
I didn't know some of that, and to see that transformation and see how much.
We've progressed and grown, it's awesome. Is he ready incredible and we want to keep growing.
So please go and take the survey and let us know you know what you want from.
Your library in the next three to five years. All right, thank you, Kylie. So next up we have Chief Call. He's going to talk to us a little bit about holiday fire safety.
Yes, good morning, So we just want to start off with reiterating the importance of smoke detectors, especially this time of year. So usually, on average, more than twenty two hundred people die from unintentional home fires, and almost two thirds of these fire deaths occur in homes with no smoke alarms or with smoke alarms that don't work. So a smoke alarms warning can reduce your risk reduce your
risk of dying from a fire by almost half. So it's important you need to check your smoke detector batteries twice a year. The batteries need to be replaced at least once a year and smoke detectors do have a shelf life, so ten years we recommend as the industry standard. After ten years, they need to be replaced. Even if they're working fine. That just make sure that they're up to date and they're going to give you the most advanced warning that they possibly can.
So a few other.
Things that we'd like to talk about this time of year is Christmas trees. If you have a live, fresh tree, those were intended to be watered. If not, they will dry out and they become a pretty substantial fire hazard. We see a lot of that if they don't, if they're not proper really maintained, they will dry out and they can easily catch fire. So we want everyone to just remember that in this time of year, just be safe. Additionally,
with space heaters when it starts turning colder. You know, space heaters aren't intended to be plugged into extension cords and they're not intended to be used in close proximity to something that's flammable. So just try to be safe with your space heaters if you use a space heater to stay warm this winter. So we just want everyone to be safe. The Fire Department does have free smoke detectors.
If you need one, you can give a fire department a call on the website contact informations on the city's website for that. If you can install it, we will come out and install it for you. So we just want to try to make sure everyone's safe this time of year for the holidays.
Well, thank you. Sometimes we become complacent with stuff like that.
It's a good reminder to check our batteries and make sure that we have those.
Smoke detectors save us. All right, well, thank you.
Thank you.
Next up, I've got Terry Lortz and to give a water update.
All right, good morning. I'm going to try to keep it brief.
We only have a few minutes here, but we did have a Water Resource of Committee last committee meeting last Thursday, and at that meeting we gave them an update on several options that the city is looking into for our long term war supply. So we're gonna flash back just a little bit a year and a half or so
that we had a fairly significant drought. Actually it was the second worst drout in the record of those basins, and so we were able to weather that through, but that just continued to remind us that our supply is something that we are continuing to work for and work toward, and so we have continued that effort previously and we are still continue that to this day. So on the update with the Water Resources Committee, they were really looking at four items in detail, and one of.
Those is Call Lake. So, if people.
Have been following our water supply journey, Call Lake is a lake that's in western Osage County. It's a very very large lake, has a tremendous amount of water rights available, but it's unfortunately about sixty miles away from US.
And so we.
Hired an engineering Companys two Engineering, to look at some costs to build a pump station and a pipeline to get waterfront Call Lake to the city's Lake at Hudson. And so that costs range from two hundred and fifty two million to just over three hundred million.
To purchase the storage rights.
And to build the pump station pipeline to convey that water to us. How that correlates to you and me as far as ratepayers. If we did the cheapest option, which is two hundred fifty two million, that would likely increase our water bill by just under one hundred dollars a month, so a fairly substantial cost that the customers would have to bear if the city went forward.
With that project all alone.
So not able to get any partners or maybe any other type of financial assistance to defray.
Some of that cost.
So a pretty large price tag, which we always knew was the case, but this gives us some real tangible numbers and up to date numbers as far as what that cost would be. We also looked at the aid of a Musa aquifer. So that's an aquifer in central Osah County. It has a tremendous amount of water rights available with it, and we were able to find a study that the USGS completed in two thousand and six regarding the.
Yield of that aquifer.
And unfortunately, it's a fairly shallow aquifer, so it's only two hundred feet deep in the area that we're looking at about senty feet.
To the water.
But it has a relatively low yield, so it just won't produce that much water. Twenty five wells will give us about one point four million gallons of water a day, and so we are looking to get between ten and sixteen million gallons of water a day to facilitate our water needs what we're projecting over the next hundred years. So that's something that would certainly help, but it's not the kind of the end all solution for us.
The aquifer option does cost.
Just under thirteen million dollars, so again, it's a very expensive option to move forward with for one point four million gallns of water a day that is available to us, and that would trying to find my note to as far as what that would cost us to move forward as far as the ratepayer, I think that's around about twelve to fifteen dollars a month that that would increase
our cost to pay for that system. To pursue. Water rights in Oklahoma are somewhat unique in that groundwater rights you either have to own the land or lease the water rights from the current landowners. So in Osage County we don't own very much land, if any, so that would require us to lease water rights from about seven
hundred acres of land to facilitate that option. So it sounded good initially, but as we get more into the numbers and looking more at the you know, the actual details of how that would be implemented, it seems to be less and less of a viable option for us to move forward with. We are also looking at two of our current water supply lakes, which is Hulea in Copane. So Copan is a lake that is up north of
us by the town of Copan. It does have some water rights that are available currently they are right now being reserved by the Town of Copan. We did have some good news here as of last week and that we've been working through the federal government through legislative action to kind of compel the corp of Engineers to sell those storage rights at an affordable rate for US. So, before the legislation was approved this past week, the cost for US to purchase US two million gallons worth of
water day was around eleven million dollars. With that legislation, which still has to be signed by President Biden, that cost could be just about a half a million, so of fairly substantial savings that we can realize assuming that the President does execute that bill, which we've been told by the federal delegation is anticipated to take place this week.
But if he fails to sign.
That then it will die when his term expires, So he has to be the one that signs that they can't just hold over to the next president. So we're hopeful that he signs that, which everybody anticipates that he will, and then there will be some time that will transpire before we're able actually to secure those rights, but we're hopeful that will be within the next year to two years to facilitate that.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, it's going to do it for our City Batters program today. Thank you very
Much, thanks for listening to one unwombed profession