408 South Bray Street: the 2002 building

2002 · THE PRESENT SEAT, AT AUDIT STRENGTH

The present library — finished in 2002, in the library's own words — stands at 408 South Bray Street, a purpose-built building south of the old downtown seat, and the state's audited statements price what the move made. The financing vehicle is visible in the federal record: a separate nonprofit, the New Carlisle-Olive Township Public Library Leasing Corporation, formed in December 2002 with the library's director, Stephen J. Boggs, named as its contact — the standard Indiana arrangement under which a building corporation holds a library facility and leases it to the board until the debt is retired. The audited capital-asset schedule of December 31, 2022 gives the seat its audited measure: land carried at $168,000; buildings at $3,813,120; improvements other than buildings at $554,662; and total capital assets of $5,220,411 — a building worth, on the books, more than four hundred times the grant that built its predecessor. The building's own grounds have become part of its program in the present decade: since the beginning of 2024 the library's landscaping has been stewarded as a native-plant project — foundation beds and a parking-lot island in native grasses and forbs, an Exploration Garden outside the children's department, an outdoor seating area at the rear, and a three-quarter-acre meadow and detention pond southwest of the lot seeded to prairie — interpreted to the public in the library's own "living library" column, the first of its kind the library has run. The fuller account of the 2002 project itself — its architect, its total cost, its bond issue's date, and its opening day — is not carried in any record this section reached, and stands as a named gap; its settlers are the leasing corporation's filings, the State Board of Accounts' examinations for 2001–2003, and the town paper's 2002 run.

Principal sources: the library's Staff Manual (finished 2002, in its words); the federal nonprofit record for the leasing corporation as carried in the public nonprofit listings (formation December 2002; Boggs named); State Board of Accounts, Financial Statement Audit Report of the library, January 1, 2021 to December 31, 2022 (Crowe LLP), Schedule of Capital Assets (read whole); the library's own "Beyond the Books: Biodiversity in Action" column, 2025 (read whole).