photo by: Bremen Keasey

The Perry-Lecompton Library has over 12,000 books in its collection.

In this week’s election, the volunteer-run Perry-Lecompton Community Library took a big step toward being able to access more resources — but the leader of its board says there’s still a lot of work left to do.

Voters overwhelmingly said yes on Tuesday to a referendum to create a new library district for Perry and Lecompton, whose boundaries will mostly match those of the Perry-Lecompton school district. In the preliminary vote totals, the library district question received 349 yes votes on the Douglas County side and 388 on the Jefferson County side, about 86% of the vote in both counties.

“We were pretty pleased with that,” said Mary Guffey, the president of the Perry-Lecompton Community Library’s board.

As the Journal-World reported, the board wanted to form a library district because it would make the library eligible for grants from the regional Northeast Kansas Library System, which Perry and Lecompton residents already pay taxes to. The voters demonstrated that they wanted more resources for their library, Guffey said, and now the board and the community will have to figure out the details of how it all works.

“It looks like the voters are in support of having a state library here in Perry, and we want to move forward,” she said, “but it’s going to take a while.”

Right now, Guffey said, the library is still waiting to hear back from NEKLS about its next steps. There is still an approval from the state that the library needs to get, Guffey said, but she described it as sort of a formality.

What the volunteers do know is that the library will eventually have to set up a budget, once it knows how much money it will have access to. Before the election, Mike McDonald, the executive director of NEKLS, estimated that the library could receive around $10,000 in funds through the regional system in its first year if the voters approved the referendum.

The library, which has no full-time librarian and is open only three days a week, eventually hopes to be able to hire staff and expand its hours. But for now, it will still be a volunteer-run endeavor, and Guffey said she doesn’t know how long it might be before that changes.

“I don’t know how soon we’re going to be able to hire a librarian and be open more hours,” she said.

The volunteers are used to working hard and figuring things out, though. The way the question got on the ballot in the first place was through the hard work of collecting hundreds of signatures on petitions in two separate counties, as the Journal-World reported.

“We did a lot of work,” Guffey said. Now, she said, it’s time for the new challenge of actually growing the library’s resources and offerings.

“Now the real work begins,” she said.