A fitness centre for your mind

(June 24) - It’s official. Reading does not make you fat. Watching television does. Sitting in front of a computer for hours on end helps widen the waist line. Reading doesn’t. Books expand the mind without expanding the love handles.

We know this because Statistics Canada studied the relationship between leisure time activities and body mass indexes of more than 42,500 Canadian adults. The results were released last week. What do they tell us? Watch a lot of television and look like Jabba the Hutt. Read a lot of books and look like a buff heart throb. Exercise helps as well, but reading is the secret ingredient in the fitness meringue.

If we were to take everyone in Guelph and toss us all onto a scale, we’d find a ton of excess poundage. There’s a lot to lose and it will take a lot of reading to get it off. None of us can afford to buy all the books we need, nor would we have room to keep them. That’s why we have a library. It gets the books and stores them for us. All we have to do is borrow, read and return them.

Our library likes to keep books circulating. It has no choice. As vice-chair of the Public Library Board, I can offer one certainty: if everyone decided to return all their books on the same day, it would be a disaster. There wouldn’t be room for them. That’s not news any more. Most of us know we need a new library, and we can be fairly confident we will get one. Public discussion on the issue has shifted from “should we” to “when will we” and “where will it go.”

We’re getting closer to knowing where. It will be somewhere on the Baker St. parking lot. The City hired some consultants who presented three preferred options to a recent city council meeting. Two have the library fully contained on the parking lot land. One has it fronting on Wyndham St. and backing onto the lot.

There’s a public consultation in the library this evening from 5:00 – 8:00 p.m. It’s a drop-in type of event where you can come and go as you please. The consultants will be consulting. People will be questioning. City staff will be responding. City councillors will be listening. Tax revolters will be revolting.

The most controversial option would see the city acquire the buildings currently occupied by the Family Thrift Store and Wyndham Art Supplies and the cowboy bar. There are apartments above the shops. The bar is between them and the health centre on a historical site. It used to be the Odeon Cinema and, before that, the old opera house.

It would probably make more sense to leave the two shops and their apartments alone and renovate the saloon. If we had bought the Post Office building, the library would have taken up the whole building and extended into the parking lot. A good architect should be able to do much the same thing with the bar.

In the end, the decision about location is the city’s. Public money funds it. The Library Board is responsible for ensuring it provides the services people need where and when they need them. City Council is responsible for providing the space in which it operates. Citizens are responsible for making sure their voices are heard as they participate in the planning process. That’s what this evening is all about.

It’s your library, and your downtown. Make sure they reflect your values and vision.

Then there’s ownership. The library will always be owned by you. The Public Libraries Act guarantees it. What your councillors have to decide soon is who will own the building. From the beginning of its days, the library building has been owned by the library.

Because of pressures resulting from a very real cash shortage, the city is considering the option of turning Baker St. over to private interests and leasing back the space. It’s a false economy. We’ll either pay in the capital budget now, or in operating budgets for decades to come.

Either way we’ll pay, so we might as well own it.

The public library is a fitness centre for the mind, and the staff are our personal fitness trainers.

Use it, cherish it, and keep it firmly within our grasp.