I have lived in West Milford for 16 years and am about to turn 70 years old. I am a home owner and taxpayer. I vote yes for school funding and for playgrounds and ballfields, etc., but I do not use them. The main benefit I get for my tax money is my library, which is the saddest little excuse for a library I have lived with since 1946 when the Women's Club of Villa Park, Ill., started a library in the old cinema building. That makeshift library was my lifeblood as a child.
As the staff at that library did, the staff in West Milford works miracles with the little it is given. But it is not enough.
The plans for the new library are wonderful and practical and might almost meet the needs of this community. If you give your kids only ballfields and argue for months about special turf for football fields, but take away what our library board has saved for the library, where will your children (mine are all grown and had the wonderful libraries of Oak Park, Ill., and Montclair to grow up with) learn to take those reading skills and expand the world of their minds?
Until West Milford voted down the earlier library referendum, I had never lived in a place that was anti-library. I know we are about woods and bears and lakes, but we have to be about education and the pleasures of the mind as well. Enviously, I spend time in the libraries in Ringwood and Suffern and Mahwah and Warwick, waiting for the day when I can relax and browse and spend time in the new West Milford Library as a proud taxpayer enjoying something I can use - I am really not into ballfields and skate parks and tennis courts.
Please spend my tax money on something I can use and want to have here.
Nancy Gibbs
West Milford