• Please speak with your friends and neighbors about supporting the building addition through your votes. In order for the warrant article to pass for construction, we will need 60% approval.
• The GPL Foundation will be engaging in a capital campaign with a variety of gift levels. Please consider any gift amount to help us make our addition a reality.

This project will be funded by a combination of money raised by the town, money raised through a capital campaign and may include money from grants or other avenues available. A charitable foundation has been created to oversee a capital campaign, and a professional fundraiser will be hired to help develop a realistic goal for that campaign.

• Public libraries are not outdated, and they are evolving constantly and over hundreds of years. During the COVID pandemic, librarians reinvented themselves with new services, expanded digital resources, and creative online programming. Public libraries will be around well into the future, in some form or another.
• YTD, through August 2022, we have welcomed a total of 25,785 visitors into the library. That is 3,223 visitors per month; 806 visitors per week.
• Yes, people still read books in many different formats: traditional, physical books; audio books, both on CD and digital; graphic books, and more.
• YTD, through August 2022, 73,970 materials have been checked out of the GPL.

This project would add much-needed parking to the village area. It would create a new entrance that is fully accessible. It adds four accessible restrooms, two on each of the floors open to the public, to the one restroom that the building currently has open to the public for a total of five restrooms. The addition will feature a community room that can host up to 100 people, is dividable allowing for two concurrent meetings, and is accessible after library hours for community meetings. The project adds to the total space available for our collection of materials and adds another meeting space on the second floor for added programming. The current offerings of the Library are limited by the size of the building. Our town survey indicated that the community was looking for comfortable places to read and work. This project adds space for study rooms and multiple comfortable seating areas. This project allows the Library to better serve the needs of our community and for better functionality now and into the future.

• The GPL is on a 2,575 footprint.
• Currently about 7,047 gross square feet—not all usable space.
• Proposed addition is 10,805 square feet; that includes a partial basement.
• Total will be 17,851 square feet when complete.

The normal, non-pandemic, number of staff members employed by the Library is 12, with the proposed layout and changes we expect to be able to fully staff the Library without a change in that number. That is our goal.

There is no space in the current building to add a fully accessible restroom, without making major changes to the interior of the beautiful historic building and the shape and layout of the current entryway makes widening the doorway challenging. Just addressing accessibility also ignores the issues of parking, comfortable places to work, and the limits the building places on our collection and programming.

The challenge in answering this question is deciding how to judge that. We are currently conducting community forums to garner support for the project and allow for input from the community. We can look at how the town voted on our last warrant article and how they vote on the warrant article on the March 2021 ballot, but the Library Board has yet to ask the community to use tax dollars to fund the preliminary stages of this project. We are doing our best to make people aware of the project and to give them many opportunities to ask questions and let us know what they think. If you have questions about the project or feedback on the design, you can email the Library Trustees at trustees@goffstownlibrary.com.