Despite a slow start, tensions were high towards the end of Tuesday night’s Carrboro Board of Aldermen meeting.

The Friends of the Carrboro Branch Library tried to convince the board to agree to the Orange County-determined criteria for the site of the new Southwest Orange County Regional Branch Library.

Friends president Alex Brown said group members have been fighting for the proposed library, a long-awaited addition to the Orange County Public Library System, for about 25 years.

However, board members were less than enthused.

Mayor Mark Chilton and board member Jackie Gist both expressed concerns that the library sites the county proposes would not best serve Carrboro residents, especially those from low and middle-income neighborhoods.

“Our towns most poor and people of color would not have access to this library,” Chilton said.

Officials worried that the criteria the County has proposed to help select a site would make potential locations inaccessible by public transportation and concentrated in suburban areas.

But Joal Hall Broun said she fears Carrboro will lose its window of opportunity, given the current availability of funds and an upcoming election for county commissioner seats.

The county is offering $5.5 million to build the library.

But under current criteria, Chilton said the county is only willing to spend $800,000 on the land, limiting options closer to downtown.

Notable:

The board approved new language in its Business Revolving Loan Fund to make the application more user-friendly and to reflect the town’s goals and values. They will no longer require businesses to be turned down by banks in their loan applications in order to qualify.

Quotable:

“Requiring businesses to be turned down by two banks to get this loan hurts their credit records, and that doesn’t seem like a good idea in practice,” Chilton said on the removal of language requiring that businesses be turned down previously by banks in order to qualify.

“I’d like to include in this modification that we require companies to whom we lend money to have anti-discrimination protections for LGBT folks, because currently at state and national levels there are no protections, only what we can do at the local level,” Alderman Lydia Lavelle said.