'A little heartbeat in our community': Parowan library receives funding for major renovation
by Arianne Brown ksl · KSL.comKEY TAKEAWAYS
- The Parowan City Library received a $142,000 grant and a $333,000 loan at 1.5% interest for renovation.
- The funding will not increase taxes and aims to fix the roof, A/C, heating and other building issues.
- Mayor Halterman cites the importance of the library to the community; the project is expected to start next spring.
PAROWAN — A longstanding public building in Parowan will soon be getting a much-needed facelift thanks to funding from mineral lease royalties in the state.
Earlier this month, the Parowan City Library was awarded a grant of $142,000 from the Permanent Community Impact Fund Board, which also came along with a $333,000 loan at 1.5% interest to fund a remodel.
The Permanent Community Impact Fund Board is a Utah state program that provides grants and low-interest loans to local communities and state agencies impacted by mineral resource development on federal lands. This fund, according to the website, helps communities that cannot collect taxes from federal lands to provide necessities like municipal buildings.
Mayor Mollie Halterman said getting this grant and the low-interest loan is a win for the community in more ways than one, emphasizing that taxes have not been raised to pay off the loan.
"We'd exhausted everything to try to figure out how to take care of this very beloved facility that is used by the entire community," Halterman told KSL. "It's our community center; we don't have a community center, so that is where people gather. ... It's just a little heartbeat in our community."
The library was originally a Carnegie library, built with money donated by Scottish American industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie in the early 1900s. That library was demolished, then rebuilt in 1965, and is the structure that stands today.
Library director Cori Adams has worked at the library since 2020 and said much of the building has long needed renovations.
"The remodel is well overdue," Adams said. "Two summers ago, we had no air conditioning, and we had to get a unit that was the size of a dishwasher, and you had to hook it up to the sink. It was just miserable."
The heating also went out, the building experienced black mold growth, and the roof has a long history of leaking, Adams explained further.
"I still have a ceiling down right now, and we just got another leak," she said. "Every time it rains, my anxiety is literally through the roof."
Despite all the challenges, Adams said she has done all she can to make the library a place the community wants to enjoy. In fact, she often holds events like a back-to-school bubble party in the parking lot. There are also groups that regularly go to the library to take advantage of what she calls the "things of the library."
"I'm trying to get some more 'things of the library' that you can take home to better your situation," she said. "I have a metal detector people can check out, so you don't have to go buy one. Right now I'm working on getting musical instruments so people can take a guitar home with an instruction book to teach themselves how to play.
"I have laser tag that the kids can take home for their birthday parties or they can play here outside," she added. "I have a Bedazzler so the girls come in and bedazzle their phone cases and their reading glasses."
More than anything, she said she wants her library to be a place where people want to come and feel at home.
"It's just so inviting; it looks like someone's house," she said. "The kids want to hang out here and the elderly want to hang out here, and it's just home. That's what I envisioned."
KSL visited the Parowan library when Adams shared her Stage 4 ovarian cancer journey this past May.
Mayor Halterman said she and other city officials really wanted to find a way to make the remodel happen, and they plan on stretching every single penny to ensure it does — as the city has long done.
"I've noticed in a lot of communities write off the older buildings and just say that they are at end of life; in Parowan, we just don't do that," Halterman said. "We're very provident living people. ... We all come from backgrounds where we had to make do with what we have. We try very hard to do things for ourselves and be creative and also just fundraise and all kinds of things. We also didn't want to try to go for a new library or go for renovations that would negatively impact our residents with higher taxes."
The mayor also made note of what she calls "community-driven" and "government-supported" projects like the library, which she believes is what makes Parowan so great.
"We can say that we need help and people will show up," she said. "Our community dictates the direction they want to go with these projects, and then we as a city government support the community. I think a lot of the time, the community just complains and waits for the government to do it, and because we have community-driven initiatives, we just support the community with the resources then that we have access to."
Halterman said the library project will include fixing the roof, air conditioning and heating units, as well as other upgrades to "rehabilitate" the building. She said they already have several community members who have offered to help at a low cost.
"It's going to be wonderful and it's going to be beautiful, but most importantly, it's going to be stable well into the future," she said. "We're believing that once we finish this round, we'll be able to keep it up and running for another 30 years, which we really wanted to do."
The city is still collecting bids for the project, which they hope to begin this coming spring.
The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.