YACHATS — Since opening a newly constructed and larger building late last year, the Yachats Public Library is seeing two to three times the foot traffic walking through its doors. Checkouts have nearly tripled, and library staff and volunteers are issuing library cards almost every day.
More than 100 people have become new patrons and roughly the same number turned out for the library’s grand reopening last week. That’s a sizeable proportion of Yachats’ population of 1,000, evidence of the library’s popularity and the number of citizens who, in some way, contributed.
The new library is 30 percent larger, with an expanded children’s section; is fully in compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA); provides more seating for adults and children; and boasts updated technology. The community room, which the previous building lacked, is already seeing heavy use, with reservations coming from government bodies, community organizations, and book clubs.
Like many public works projects, the new building was years in the making. Originally, supporters planned a renovation and small expansion — not an entirely new, and much larger, building.
The project was beset with challenges, financial and otherwise, that were solved with unexpected windfalls. Through it all, a group of city and library leaders — armed with flexibility, optimism, resourcefulness, and tapping into Yachats’ famed civic culture — were determined to see the project succeed.
Reflecting on the nearly decade-long process, David Rivinus, chair of the Library Commission said, “It was sort of charmed.”
It all started with a bequest. In 2014, John Lester Hall Jr., a long-time Yachatzian, gave $150,000 to the city with one string attached: The money had to be used for the library.
“Nobody had a clue that was coming,” said Sue May, president of Friends of Yachats Library.
(While speaking to Oregon ArtsWatch, May insisted that any article not give credit to her specifically, but to Friends of Yachats Library. “It was a group effort,” she said. The group’s wish to stay out of the limelight is a well-known fact in Yachats).
The money sat in the city’s coffers for a few years. Eventually, the Library Commission began discussing how the money could best be used to improve the library. The commission decided on expanding the library by 400 square feet.
Friends of Yachats Library launched a letter-writing campaign and raised an additional $25,000.
The commission hired a contractor, who told them that a partial remodel would not have passed an inspection. “We didn’t know that at the time,” Rivinus said.
Yachats’ library exists largely due to dozens of volunteers over the decades. Until 2022, when the city hired the library’s first paid staff person, the library was operated entirely by volunteers, making it Oregon’s only legally recognized public library with that distinction. The volunteers logged an average of 2,900 hours each year to keep the library open six days a week.
For good reason: The library’s check-out statistics are eye-popping, with patrons checking out or renewing an average of 13 items for every person in the library’s service area, higher than other libraries in Lincoln County.
Volunteers even built the library building, in 1973, the same year Yachats’ city council formerly established a public library. It’s unknown how knowledgeable those volunteer builders were about building codes, but Rivinus said that people could, as they walked through the library, “feel the floor bounce.”
As the Commission figured out how to proceed, another, completely unexpected large pot of money fell into the library’s lap.
In 2020, Marg Petersen gave $150,000 to the library in honor of her late husband, Bent Edvard Petersen, who had been a math professor at Oregon State University. There was one catch: The library also had to take Petersen’s library of 1,000 books, all of which were mathematics books.
Petersen’s gift doubled the amount in the bank. “We had this money start showing up for us,” May said. “Those two family amounts were huge and unexpected.”
While the Friends group sorted through Petersen’s personal library, selling some volumes and donating others, the Library Commission decided how to use the additional money.
In 2020, the Commission hired Penny Hummel, a now-retired consultant and former librarian, to conduct a feasibility and needs assessment to look “at the library needs more holistically.”
Hummel’s assessment of the “small library in a small picturesque village” ended up being just as consequential to the library’s evolution as the eventual construction of its new building.
Noting that “the library is well loved and well used” and a product of Yachats’ “DIY civic culture,” Hummel concluded that the building lacked “adequate space for the library collection, seating, programming and youth services,” which restricted “the library’s ability to fully serve the Yachats community,” especially given that Yachats’ population was slowly increasing.
Hummel made numerous recommendations, nearly all of which the Library Commission set about implementing. In July 2021, the library joined the Oregon Digital Library Consortium, which added more than 60,000 e-books and audiobooks to the library’s collection.
The Commission wrote and approved new policies for the library’s collection management procedures, patron conduct, and patron confidentiality. The library’s website was separated from the city’s and is now a stand-alone site.
Hummel also made recommendations about the library’s building that completely upended plans for a small-scale renovation.
Noting that the library was not ADA compliant and lacked adequate space, the needs assessment recommended renovating or rebuilding the library and increasing its size by roughly 30 percent, to 3,756 square feet.
The Commission proceeded with plans to completely remodel the building, to bring it up to code, and add an additional 1,200 square feet, which would increase the library’s size per Hummel’s recommendation.
The Commission hired M|D Architect + Design to create a design that incorporated the recommendations from Hummel’s needs assessment, which would help determine the price tag.
Finding ways to honor Yachats’ history and the volunteers who built the library was among the tasks, said Marissa Doyle, owner of M|D Architect + Design. The new building’s vaulted ceiling pays homage to the original building’s peaked roof.
“We wanted to maintain the essence of the volunteers of the ‘70s,” Doyle said. “The main entrance and shape of the roof mimic the design.”
Other ways the design made Hummel’s recommendations a reality included determining how large the children’s section needed to be and ensuring sight lines from the circulation desk to the children’s area and the back of the library.
The design reflects the library’s location, within walking distance to the ocean and with a north-facing entrance, by having a vestibule with an east-facing door and skylights that let in natural light from the west, without blinding patrons as the sun sets.
The price tag came to slightly over $1 million.
Then came another bump in the road — or, in this case, something like quicksand.
A geological assessment of the building and its foundation, which is required in tsunami zones along the Oregon Coast, revealed that “the library’s foundation sat on the geologic equivalent of Jell-O,” Rivinus said.
For the existing building to be brought up to code, approximately 150 helical piers would have to be drilled into bedrock and connected to the library’s foundation.
“The whole idea of trying to preserve the existing building just was not going to happen,” Rivinus said.
Plans changed again. It was cheaper to demolish the library and build an entirely new one. Even so, “the price just sky-rocketed,” Rivinus said, to $1.35 million. “At that point, it looked like we were cooked.”
It would have been even more expensive to move the library out of the tsunami zone, because that would have required buying property. (And, in Rivinus’ thinking, it would take a “colossal tsunami” to destroy the new building, while landslides and wildfires are more likely to happen).
The Commission attempted to simplify the design to a “Quonset hut-type thing,” Rivinus said. “We couldn’t do it. We’d rather not build anything. We worked extra hard to make this design happen.”
Then came yet another windfall of money.
Sandy Dunn, the previous president of Friends of Yachats Library, who died last summer, had experience with grant-writing and had been applying for grants throughout the project.
In 2023, the Friends applied for and received a grant from The Ford Family Foundation, which has provided grant funding to public libraries around Oregon, for $250,000.
It is believed to be the single largest private foundation award given to Yachats in the city’s history.
Around the same time, the Friends secured a $20,000 grant from the Roundhouse Foundation. They also received grants from the Oregon Community Foundation, a Community and Economic Development Grant from Lincoln County, and the Yachats Lions Club. And private donations kept coming in.
“The Friends worked their tails off,” Rivinus said.
The two large grants put enough money in the bank to begin soliciting a contractor. The grants also started a ticking clock, since grant funding generally has to be used within one year.
“It lit some fire under the whole group,” May, of Friends of Yachats Library, said. “We were scrambling for money. We got to the point where we were running out of time.”
The Commission approached city government. That, May said, “jumpstarted a lot.”
Around that time, Yachats’ city government rapidly expanded. The city hired its first city manager in 2017, and city staff increased from three people to 20. Its current mayor, Craig Berdie, has prioritized getting projects that had been “languishing” started and completed, including rebuilding the Little Log Church Museum.
“This had been talked about for probably 12 years,” Berdie said. “We either stop talking about it or we do it.”
“The city got incredibly serious,” May said. Both The Ford Foundation and the Roundhouse Foundation gave the city more time and “we kept limping along,” May said.
The city realized that the library was located within Yachats’ urban renewal area. Previous city leaders had thought the urban renewal fund could only be used for the city’s storm and wastewater infrastructure. Looking into the legal parameters for the fund revealed those dollars could go toward library construction.
“That was a surprise,” May said. “Nobody ever thought about” using those dollars.
In the end, the city contributed $638,000 toward construction. Suddenly, after “wallowing” and wondering for years if the project would ever happen, May said, there was a 270-day window in which construction had to be complete.
Construction ended on time last December and slightly under budget. “It was such a long haul,” May said. “We didn’t do it on purpose. It was just luck.”
“We get stuff done,” she added. “We certainly had a bunch of people involved … for a long time and stuck with it.”
Many credit Rivinus, who remained as Commission chair for eight years (rather than the typical two). “He was going to see it through,” May said.
“He was very determined,” Doyle, the architect, said. “He was really passionate, too. When we had that foundation issue come up, [he said,] ‘Let’s take some time, regroup, we’ll come back and visit this.’ He was always very positive and very optimistic.”
The new library, Rivinus said, has a “spaciousness and quiet elegance.”
In September 2022, the city hired the library’s first paid staff person (another of Hummel’s recommendations). Berdie credits library administrator Traci Altson for “significantly” improving the children’s section, applying for grants to increase the library’s collection, and curating the collection.
Altson said she is most excited about continuing to expand the library’s collection, including its Pacific Northwest collection, and, through having a meeting room, increasing programming. And she is making an additional hire: In the next month, she expects to hire a new children’s librarian who will oversee the expansion of children’s programming.
In the coming years, the library may explore the viability of joining the Lincoln County Library District, which requires a vote of Yachats citizens to add themselves to the tax district. Joining the district would increase the library’s operating budget through collected tax dollars, and Yachats’ library would be able to access the shared catalog of participating libraries.
“We’re growing up,” May quipped. “Good for us.”
