Cleveland and Johnston County Libraries – A Comparison
Each library in Johnston County is independent, but Cleveland is the only one located in and serving an unincorporated area and therefore it is the only one banned from receiving tax dollars and many corporate grants. Cleveland Library has the largest service area - 10-mile ring population 164,476 with 48,849 children – which is 20,000 residents more than Cary, North Carolina’s 7th largest town. Town libraries serve where they tax and have no provision to increase their collection size or branch out to serve the latest 100,000+ residents.
Cleveland Library, hidden in a rear warehouse at 5533 NC HWY 42 W STE D96, (Garner) by I-40 Exit 312 and N.C. 42 in Cleveland Township, Johnston County ; 919-661-6565 – lent its first book on August 4, 2008, the collection grew to 180,000 books and movies by 8/4/11- a 3 year net growth of 1,100 weekly –– Cleveland is a membership library recognized by the I.R.S. as a public charity – it has multiple library loan arrangements and music in the stacks - Director Ronald Lee Still – 52-hour 7-day a week schedule - staffed with all volunteers, who served well over 30,000 hours Members get: free Internet U-verse 18.0 service and WiFi, computer access, FAX, and use of a commercial copier, free access to 180,000+ books, movies, CDs, and audio books for a 2-week loan period, and can request 1-3 day delivery of 2,000,000 additional books. Uses zero tax dollars. |
The Public Library of Johnston County and Smithfield, Smithfield - evolved 60 years after a small library was operating inside Hood's Drug Store (1903). The Woman's Club was credited with growing the Smithfield library from 1915 to 1940 and in the 1960s, the Town-County Library was born. Selma Public Library, Selma - 52 1/2 hours per week Hocutt-Ellington Memorial Library, Clayton - started when the Women's Club put out a call for book donations in 1927. It received 600 books and popped opened. By 2008 it advertised 61,000 books and 2,400 books on tape. That is an 81 year net growth of 14 books per week. It circulates 144,000 items annually and advertises 38 1/2 hours weekly. Uses $400,000 in tax dollars annually. |
Cleveland Children’s Library has 27,000 books and movies. Cleveland Library is giving away $710,000 worth of new books to adult readers. No membership required - FREE Either is larger than several of Johnston’s libraries.
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Mary Duncan Public Library, Benson - advertises 48 hours weekly and 25,000 items cataloged, including a complete collection of Johnston County's textbooks. Kenly Public Library, Kenly - 40 hours per week schedule and 16,943 cataloged or 17,743 items. James Bryan Creech Public Library, Four Oaks - 15 hours weekly, Internet access, 14,100 items |
Cleveland Library’s 320 sq. ft. bookmobile/annex holds 10,000 standard sized hard cover books at the adult reading level – no duplicate titles. It has electrical, telephone, and Internet wiring; heat/AC; and fire security.
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Johnston's Bookmobile - 2,000 items Princeton Public Library, Princeton - 100 sq. ft, 10 hours weekly Johnston County Heritage Center, Smithfield – not a general interest library Atkinson Memorial Library, Selma - closed Pine Level Library - closed |
Cleveland Library, was started in an unincorporated township with 20,000 resisdents lacking a public library facility or locally based books, serves a 10-mile circle with 164,476 residents (48,849 children), a 15-minute drive circle count of 489,895. Its 10-mile population is greater than the 141,132 population of Cary, North Carolina's seventh largest town.
According to North Carolina's 1998 Guidelines, a library should own a minimum of two books per resident plus other materials and 90% of the service population should be within a 15-minute drive. 85-year old Hocutt Memorial Library in Clayton is Johnston County's nearest town library with 65,000 books, which is great for a town of 18-20,000. But the standards call for 328,952 to 979,790 books for the 10 and 15-mile circles.
In just three years, Cleveland's volunteers had the library opening seven days a week, nearly 200,000 books and movies in the collection, $710,000 in new books to give to residents, and was holding daily Friends of the Library book sales.
Cleveland Library is committed to providing materials and services in a variety of formats that satisfy the educational, informational, recreational, and cultural needs of our diverse community. The Library supports lifelong independent learning and the individual's need for current, heritage, popular and informational materials. Cleveland Library serves as a center for community information, services and activities. Our staff uses traditional and innovative methods and technologies to provide quality library collections, efficient services, and programs.
Join us - donate - volunteer.
Cleveland Library is built and run without taxes - not municipal, not county, not state, and not federal.
Unincorporated Cleveland Township, the largest government entity in Johnston County, is where residents and friends are building a library, when our governments and taxes will "not provide one book, one dollar, or one hour of help."
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To the left is a photo of all public library books based in unincorporated Johnston County. This blank photo is not an error. It shows the services provided, where people don't incorporate and pay real estate taxes. Complete city taxes in North Carolina run as low as $2,507 on a $300,000 property. |
The Standards vs. Reality
Johnston County does not have a county library system, but an affiliation of only the tax funded town libraries.
The N.C. General Assembly mandated the same detailed annual reports be filed from membership libraries in the state that they ask from all taxpayer funded libraries, except the County and State Librarians spared us the paperwork by refusing to accept our reports.
Standard - 90% of a library's service popuation will be within a 15-minute drive, with a minimum of 2 books per capita. Resident count provided by Johnston County from DemographicsNow. Book counts from State Library.
Ring Area |
Residents |
Min. Books Needed
at 2 per resident
in ring area |
County Books Housed in Ring Area |
| 40/42 5-mile | 43,773 |
87,546 |
0 from Johnston and Wake Counties |
| 40/42 10-mile | 164,476 |
328,952 |
65,000 Clayton, 0 Wake |
| 40/42 15-minute | 489,895 |
979,790 |
65,000 Clayton, 0 Wake |
| All Johnston Co. | 167,367 |
334,734 |
287,919 in All Johnston County ('08-'09 report - short 46,815) |
Community Response
Between August 2008 and August 2011, appalled and concerned donors responded with 1-3,000 books weekly. Photo below shows one day's donations - 17 cases of books and 155 DVDs..
1 day -155 DVDs
Immediate Needs for Library and Bookmobile
- $1,000 monthly for bar codes, genre labels, shelf labels, tape, and library cards
- $3,000 monthly for lease, utilities, etc.
- paint bookmobile entrance to waterproof floor and sheetrock
- touch-up interior and exterior painting
- replace two air conditioner cover screws - whoops, someone used the wrong size
- label, clean, and shelve books
Cleveland Library is an I.R.S. recognized public charity operating a library with memberships and donations, not taxes. Tryon, North Carolina has one of the last 16 subscription libraries in the country. According to North Carolina Library Association records, all public libraries were privately funded, until the General Assembly authorized Durham to become the first town in North Carolina to raise taxes to fund a public library. On August 4, 2008, Cleveland Library established a service schedule and started lending books for free to residents living outside incorporated town limits. It was funded by donations and thriff shop sales. In 2011, it joined many of our nation's formerly free to the public libraries, which lost government funding and have switched to a fee system to be able to continue to provide services. Without universal taxpayer funding, libraries must charge fees or close their doors. Independent North Carolina libraries always have the risk of raising their own operating budgets from non-government sources, but they might also be able to stay above the fight of politically driven budgets, staff cuts, hours cuts, and stripped book budgets. Cleveland is the only Johnston Library not in an incorporated area. We have been told that if Cleveland Library affiliates or joins with a county public library system, regardless what Cleveland's board directs, it would have to replace a minimum of 5% or at least 9,000 books each year at a replacement cost of $315,000, plus pay initial catalog conversion fees and annual fees to cover the costs of participation in the county's book catalog. Johnston's towns budget $965,785, the county $475,000, and the state $199,192 annually. Because Cleveland's growing collection is the largest outside of Smithfield, the annual affiliation costs to Cleveland Library could reach $400-500,000 annually. Community volunteers will save 75% of the library's full operating budget by eliminating salary and benefit costs. Cleveland was also told by the county staff that it would have to meet a core collection standard before opening, something that other Johnston libraries did not do prior to affiliation. We have to strengthen our collection and purge outdated and worn books, but as long as there are multiple library loan arrangements for exchanging books, we see no point in making every library in the state order identical collections. Even Wake's libraries don''t have identical collections. After spending several years searching Wake and Johnston catalogs, we already see the effect of policies, censorship, which limit or eliminate major concentrations of facts in their collections. No government money was provided to buy any of Cleveland's first 180,000 books, yet no public library collection in the county is as diversified or grew as fast as Cleveland, and Cleveland serves the county's largest populated political division from its base library. Join us and let's see how much more we can do in the community, without government support and control. Remember the affiliation costs for 20 years could cost $10 million without the budget for collection growth and the tail will be wagging the dog!
After Cleveland's Basic Needs Ministry tried for six years to get books into circulation in the community via the schools, without success, it surveyed residents for two years, and registered Cleveland Library as a dba and started lending books. By 2011, wiith more than 180,000 books and movies on site, Cleveland Library has more books than 29 North Carolina county, regional, or municipal libraries and more movies than 34 North Carolina county, regional, or municipal libraries. Public librarians from Wake and Johnston counties said they would budget $35 to buy the average book and would have used $6.3 milion in tax dollars to purchase the Cleveland collection. Cleveland had to find a creative way to get the books, because like most libraries started in Johnston, it was blocked from tax dollars. It is the only Johnston library not in an incorporated area, yet it had the most successful start at building a collection. The director simply followed the path of books from creation to the pulp mill, by asking authors, editors, reviewers, publishers, distributors/jobbers, sales reps, dealers, big box stores, new book stores, used book stores, post-library sales, book exchanges, Internet stores, friends, strangers, schools, libraries, civic organizations, and then asked for gift cards form big box retailers to buy some of their 30% off retail books. In his younger years he went into dumpsters, but stopped when no longer able to get out of them. However, he has gone into recyclers' Gaylord’s, before the books were shredded.
The banner photo shows a volunteer dwarfed by one week's additions to the collection, including several cases of new books purchased from Scholastic for the children's library and many new adult hard cover fiction books received from the Durham County Library.
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