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NEWPORT — The Newport City Council heard at their July 7 meeting two updates on ongoing city affairs.
Mandy Walters, Pend Oreille County Library District director of libraries, updated the council on the Newport Library building project, in which the branch will relocate from 116 S. Washington Ave. to a new building on one-half of a 1-acre lot by Stratton Elementary School. POCLD has access to the lot through a memorandum of understanding with the council that is set to expire in 10 years.
Walters projected that the project’s first phase of design will be completed by Thanksgiving and provide a blueprint, cost estimates and funding sources.
“We are not anywhere near being able to break ground, obviously,” Walters said at the meeting. “But we are making strategic moves.”
One of those moves, Walters said, was receiving a capacity grant from the Greater Newport Area Chamber of Commerce. The grant allowed POCLD to hire strategic planning and facilities specialists from ReThinking Libraries, a library consulting firm, to assess POCLD’s locations.
The Newport Library serves about 8,000 residents — almost two-thirds of the county’s population. RTL found that the Newport Library is about one-third the size POCLD needs to serve them, resulting in limitations on both programs and collections. And according to a survey conducted by POCLD and RTL, the community wants expansions to both.
Besides space, the Newport Library’s size also has a negative impact on materials handling and logistics.
“Because Newport is the central hub for us, we have efficiency problems because of the way the space is laid out and trying to move materials and sort,” Walters said. “To not only go to our out-county partners but to our other locations in the county.”
RTL recommended relocating the Newport Library to a new building of 13,000 square feet.
To do so, POCLD partnered with Youth Emergency Services to hire Building-Work, an architecture firm that designed Metalines Community Library’s remodel in 2024. So far, POCLD and Building-Work have met with city administrator Abby Gribi to discuss layout and parking, Walters said, and they have another meeting with the city scheduled in August. Public feedback sessions will follow in the fall.
At the meeting, Walters confirmed that the new building will include a subdividable meeting room and a commercial kitchen, two facilities that Gribi said the community expressed a “high need” for in the survey. The new building may also expand with the county’s population.
“The city is growing, the county is growing. It’s not growing super fast, ballooning, but it’s growing,” Walters said. “And so [RTL] were also like, ‘When you design this, have a plan for growth.’” RTL determined that the Newport Library had average to above-average usage despite limited facilities, indicating even more usage if those facilities improve with a new building.
But POCLD has to raise what Walters estimates to be multiple millions of dollars to construct it, all before its MOU with the council expires in the next 10 years. A lot of those dollars would have come from federal funding that is now “up in the air,” Walters said. The state budget is “also not great” as an alternative due to the deficit and a 50% match requirement that is hard to meet for library districts of POCLD’s size.
Nevertheless, Walters said the city has options for funding sources that the Newport Library may not, such as grants.
“We’re scrappy. I have faith that we will figure it out,” Walters said. “But it’s not something that’s going to break ground soon. It’s going to be a little bit of time before we figure out how to get the bucket of dollars we need together.”
Earlier in the meeting, county commissioner Robert Rosencrantz updated the council on the formation of a countywide Emergency Services district. He said the Board of County Commissioners recently decided to draft bylaws for submission to their legal adviser Dolly Hunt. Once she has approved Rosenkrantz’s draft, the board will submit it to stakeholders for review and comments.
The board will then hold another public hearing projected for August, have another discussion as a board to consider changes to the draft, finalize the bylaws and resubmit them to stakeholders, Rosenkrantz said.
“That’s where I don’t know what the timing will be or what the process will be,” Rosencrantz said. “But we’re going into another round of, we heard, loud and clear, people’s support, objections, criticisms, omissions, and we’re taking that seriously.”
After Rosencrantz left the meeting, Gribi gave her comments as city administrator, the foremost of which were on the countywide EMS district. The council proceeded to discuss their opposition to forming one for about one-third of the hour-long meeting. They cited the same reasons the city and SPOFR have given in other public meetings and comments submitted to the board: unanswered questions, taxation and loss of local control. Then, there was the timing of the board’s decision to draft bylaws.
Gribi had been requesting bylaws from the commissioners for at least a year. By drafting them now, Gribi said the board will add another year to a process that has already wasted over a year of her and other stakeholders’ time.
“This represents our district here, and we pretty solidly last meeting stated, ‘We don’t understand this, we don’t have enough information, we don’t want this at this point,’” council member Mark Zorica said at the meeting. “And I feel like we’re not being listened to.”
Gribi also said that while the commissioners cannot mandate municipalities like Newport to join the EMS district, they can with fire districts such as South Pend Oreille Fire and Rescue, with which the city is contracted.
“If they force SPOFR, it forces our hand,” Gribi said. “Because we cannot benefit from anything from an EMS district if we are not a part of it.”
In other business, the city’s application to switch to Risk Management Service Agency, a local government risk pool, for insurance coverage was approved. At the meeting, the council reviewed and accepted RMSA’s bylaws and an interlocal agreement with RMSA, then authorized membership in RMSA.
Upon an inquiry from council member Elizabeth Spring, Gribi announced that the Splash Park will open as soon as it resolves electrical issues caused by a failing central processing unit, one of which the city has on order.
