Consumption site aids library

DRUG-USE ISSUES BEGINNING TO EASE IN AREA AROUND LETHBRIDGE PUBLIC LIBRARY

The downtown branch of the Lethbridge Public Library has seen a “marked” improvement in regards to illicit drug activity since the opening of the City’s supervised consumption site.

Lethbridge Public Library CEO Terra Plato provided city council with an annual update on the library last week, with one of the prominent issues involving safety and drug use at the facility.

“(Last year) was nothing if not a year of challenges for the downtown library,” said Plato. She noted as in other parts of the country, the downtown library has been highly impacted by the opioid crisis.

“The state of the community is reflected in its public spaces and, at its core, the public library is a public space for everyone. It’s often the first to reflect what is going on in the community.”

Safety was an on-going concern for the library in 2017 as staff worked to maintain and promote the core values of being a welcome and inclusive place for everyone.

Plato said safety upgrades to the facility included adding a second security guard during open hours, a number of building upgrades made during renovations, and adapting washrooms to be barrier-free.

“This is all funded internally,” she said. “We made responding to safety concerns the number-one priority for the library.”

Plato said 2017 was significant for the library because it, like Lethbridge itself, is transitioning away from smallcity issues and beginning to deal more with issues seen in larger centres.

“We’re seeing ourselves act more like a big-city library than a small-town library — as I’m sure many organizations in the city are experiencing.”

Coun. Mark Campbell asked about any impact seen at the library in regards to the City’s safe consumption site, as well as the arrival of warmer weather.

“When the supervised consumption site opened, we certainly saw a decline in some of the activity we’ve been seeing at the library,” she said.

She noted the decline was “modest,” and that there are still issues with drug use at the facility.

“We were on an incline and we’ve seen a decrease,” she later clarified. “I think it’s had a marked effect on the library.

“We continue to expect to see that decline over time, as people learn about supervised consumption services, and more people go, and they are able to expand their capacity. We expect to see a continued decrease, but we are very happy with what we have seen in the first six or seven weeks of it being open.”

Public libraries are one of the few places open to all members of the public, and can serve as a warm place to go when the weather is bad. Plato said this can be seen in winter, when larger numbers of people who “have nowhere else to go” spend more time there. When the weather warms, those numbers decline.

“We believe people need to have a safe place to go,” she said. “We want everyone who comes to the library to be safe as well.”

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