
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, May 20, 1995                   TAG: 9505220073
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: C3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: RICHARD FOSTER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

BEDFORD LIBRARY BOARD WANTS BOND ISSUE

If you're a kid in Bedford County's Forest neighborhood, you need a reservation sometimes just to attend story time at the branch library.

Forest's 1,760-square-foot library is a rented storefront in a mini-mall, and it doesn't have a meeting room. Consequently, only 15 children can attend the library's popular story time, and sometimes, they have to sign up a week in advance.

And as they listen to stories other kids can't look for books, because there's no room to do both.

"There's no point in thinking up more creative programs if there's no space to put them in," said Tom Hehman, Bedford's public library director.

The situation is pretty much the same all over the fast-growing county. Out of a 700-square-foot leased storefront, the Moneta branch library serves 8,000 people. Forest's library serves 15,000.

The county's four branch libraries are so small, in fact, that if they were combined into a single library, it still wouldn't meet the state's suggested size for one branch library - 4,500 square feet.

On Monday, Hehman and the six-member Bedford Public Library Board will ask the county Board of Supervisors to put a $7 million bond referendum on the November ballot for construction and expansion of branch libraries.

The bond money would add 18,000 square feet of library space countywide. It would build new branch libraries in Montvale, where there is no library now, and in Stewartsville, Moneta and Forest, where the library board leases space.

It also would add floor space to the Big Island branch library, which is the only library housed in a county-owned building.

Even though the construction would add much-needed space, three of the libraries - Big Island, Montvale and Stewartsville - still wouldn't meet state size standards.

The library board could have proposed building fewer, but bigger, libraries as a consultant's report suggested, Hehman said, or it could have proposed building more libraries and making library services accessible to a wider area of the county. It chose the latter.

Also, he said, many bulky library reference volumes, which used to take up valuable space, are now available online or by CD-ROM - services that will become increasingly available to library patrons.

A new $2.4 million central libary in Bedford will open this summer.

by CNB