new Yarmouth library will remain unbuilt.

Over the past years, the Yarmouth Public Libraries have seen an increase in demand in almost every regard. From visits going up twenty five percent in the past two years, to attendance at events and reading programs going up by 169% in the past three, one thing is clear; these libraries are clearly bringing people in.

Despite all of this, the library does not meet ADA requirements fully, lacks adequate shelving for their expansive collection, and has very few spaces for meetings and events, which have also shot up in demand by 1450% in the past three years. These buildings are well over a hundred years old, they serve their purposes as best they can, but are being bottlenecked by the issues that stem from their age.

A solution to this, of course, would be another library, One that meets the demand, and can properly service the people of Yarmouth.

The town of Yarmouth knows this, and has been attempting to build one for twenty odd years. Since 2004, there have been two attempts to secure the funding for a new library building, both following the same pattern; it gets approved at a town meeting, and then shot down during voting. The first attempt lost by just 33 votes. This time, on May 19th 2026, it lost by over a thousand.

The proposed building, at least the one drafted in 2025, would have been nearly twice the size of the two current libraries combined. It would have had a dedicated children's space, a young adult STEM room, an auditorium, a classroom, six individual study rooms, and multiple meeting spaces. It would have been fully ADA accessible, energy efficient, and designed to serve as a warming and cooling center during power outages and emergencies.

So why did it fail?

What voters rejected was a $35.7 million debt exclusion, a temporary property tax increase that would have allowed the town to borrow money specifically to build this new library. Based on our math on median assessed home in Yarmouth, this would have meant roughly a 4-6% increase per year in taxes, or roughly 100~$ more at the end of the year for most, for the duration of the loan. Passing the measure would also have landed the town of Yarmouth a $13.4 million state grant, covering over 40% of the total cost, dropping the town's actual share to $22.3 million.

That grant is now gone. The town will likely not see another opportunity like it for at least five years, and given cuts of the current administration to federal library funding, almost certainly longer. Because of this, years of work by committee members, architects, and library staff have now been shelved for this indefinite waiting period.

Library Building Committee Chair Judy Conor Tarver put it plainly in a statement released the morning after the vote: the contradiction between leadership support for the Comprehensive Plan and opposition to the library project itself likely played a role in the outcome.

The library workers themselves will carry on. They will continue to run programs, check out books, and serve their community in buildings that were never designed for the demands they need to meet. They will continue doing as best they can with what they have, despite it not meeting their needs.

So what next? What is to be done in the current moment? As mentioned previously, it will take years to get the grant money needed for the new library, and during that voting cycle, who's to say it wont get shot down once more?

While I'm sure you've heard it before, and its getting tiresome to hear; the best solution is to talk to those in your community about it. While that applies only to our readers in Yarmouth, it is the most important work one can do when they would like a project like this to be achieved. The permenant residency of Yarmouth is roughly 25,150, and out of that amount, only 3,757 voted in this election. By talking to those who are participating, and by convincing those who are not to show up, the push towards achieving the project grows ever stronger.