Wauseon Library Open House
June 10, 2007

Board President Kristy Snyder

Welcome to our Celebration!!

This is an exciting day for our library to officially open our children’s area. We are thrilled to have so many here today on such a beautiful Sunday afternoon. Many are past and present Board members, who in years past, had the vision of this addition to the building. Then, most recently, the development of this area for a children’s space.

It took plenty of time to come up with the right design --- for that we thank Vetter Design Group. We then needed someone to do the construction--- we thank Zachrich Leasing for working around our needs. Since none of us had any knowledge or experience with construction projects like this, we needed someone that had this background. We enlisted the help of Jeff Buehrer who has the local interest and also is with the Vetter Design. Jeff served as our Project Manager. Jeff helped us solve issues that, in the beginning, could have stopped this whole project. He persisted to find a solution and I believe we have it. We have had some pretty hard rains lately and have not had any problems down here. Let’s hope it holds. As any construction project you come across has hurdles like that, and now we have accomplished it’s completion and this room looks GREAT!

We are proud to say that we did this project loan free. The total approved by the Board for this project was $112,000 which we anticipate at the full completion to be well under. This money came from our building fund. This is an account that we invest monies that have been donated to the library for building improvements or new buildings. We thank the many people who have made this possible with their contributions to the library. A major contributor was Dorothy Biddle. It did take more than her contributions to complete this children’s area. And we thank all of them. We see the use of those contributions as a continued investment in our community’s future. Children who read and do so regularly do better in school, which leads to good jobs which leads to a successful community.

Seeing this new children’s area through to completion has some special meaning to me personally. Many of you know my late father, Frank Kubovich. He was a past Board member and past president of our library. He was also, like many of us here, an avid reader. I know that some of the staff here that knew him can attest to that!! I didn’t understand it all when I was young, but my dad would take me weekly to our area library for story time, summer reading programs and any other library events. I now have many fond memories of time spent with my dad at the library. He showed me the great enjoyment that reading can provide and the important role our library plays in our community, as a place for endless possibilities. We as a Board of the Wauseon Library know that with this beautiful area many children will come and create fond memories and at the same time come to know the great enjoyment of reading and have a whole world of possibilities open up for them. All this by reading and using our library and it all starts here in our children’s area. To our Future!!