No frills

To the editor:

For the second year in a row, Social Security recipients will not get any cost-of-living increase. People on fixed incomes are balancing exponential growth costs for taxes, food, fuel and shelter and enjoying less for treats and niceties. The treats have to give in for the ever-increasing taxes and necessities making living conditions more austere.

Now, we are faced with another tax increase for library expansion. A fine library in Lawrence is a good thing. However, I have a problem if it is designed to be a show monument beyond that necessary for library operations. I submit that in these everlasting tight times, we must build a strictly functional building with more austerity and less eye candy treats.

The existing building could have been more efficient in the use of space when originally built. There is wasted space of 1,680 covered square feet worth over a million dollars of today’s building value that could have been utilized for 38 years if the east and south walls were originally built out to where the roof edge now is. That is an example of wasted space that public tax dollars must never support. I suggest that the project be efficient and tax-funded without all of the extra visual niceties. Those folks who want to see this library become a visual monument with added expensive decorative appointments should raise strictly private money to fund the necessary architectural design and adornment additions to make this their monument to look at.

Robert J. Vaughan,

Lawrence