Library Fees

Good news arrived last week for the beautifully renovated and expanded East Hampton Library in the form of a State Supreme Court decision that gave it $100,000 from a trust established in 1939 by William Carter Dickerman, president of the American Locomotive Company. The board of managers raised an amazing $3 million in private donations to pay for the lion's share of the project and the windfall will allow them to pay off the rest.

Much of the thanks for the expansion should go to Tom Twomey, the board's new president, who coaxed and cajoled the community into reaching deep into its pockets for the cause. And State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. gets a handshake for negotiating an intelligent settlement of the Dickerman Trust with the too-strident staff of State Attorney General Dennis Vacco.

It should be all smooth sailing for the spacious, elegantly designed, and debt-free library from now on.

But the East Hampton Free Library, as it used to be known, is not free for thousands of town residents. Those who live in Springs, which has only a rudimentary library and one that is not a part of the Suffolk Library System, which provides inter-library loans, must pay $50 a year for a nonresident library card.

Although no Springs taxpayers' dollars go to the East Hampton Library, the board of managers should consider lowering that fee since the library now stands on such a strong fiscal foundation.

It may not be a huge sum to many of us but it is an obstacle for some who nonetheless deserve easy access to, as Longfellow put it, "the love of learning, the sequestered nooks/And all the sweet serenity of books."