Advertisement
Trimming $208 million from a $1 billion bond-to-build bill Monday, Gov. Tim Pawlenty singled out and derided a $400,000 proposal for a new brass-band music lending library in Chatfield as an example of “misplaced priorities.”
 |
Teresa Cerling, manager of the Chatfield Brass Band Music Lending Library in Chatfield, Minn, stands on a ladder in one of the isles of filing cabinets, which contain 30,000 pieces of cataloged sheet music. The collection has outgrown the building and Chatfield Brass Band Inc., is seeking funding for a larger library location in Chatfield with better facilities, such as climate control for heat and humidity.
(Photo by Melissa Carlo/Winona Daily News)
|
The governor’s harsh words surprised Chatfield Brass Band Inc., a nonprofit organization that oversees the community band and one of the world’s largest collections of traditional American band sheet music in a city of 2,400.
“The governor saying this has no merit surprises me,” said lending library manager Teresa Cerling. “I don’t think he understands what we do here. He called it a museum.”
Several rows of four-drawer filing cabinets stacked on four-drawer cabinets — with boxes piled on top and sides — fill the Chatfield Brass Band Music Lending Library.
The library has cataloged 30,000 composition titles since 2002, but Cerling estimated they’re about 80 percent through the inventory, not counting 1,000 unsorted boxes.
Many titles date back to the late 1800s, when sheet music was first printed, Cerling said. Some are out of print and can’t be found anywhere else.
Bands across the nation and in Japan, Germany, Australia and Italy borrow the free material, Cerling said.
Crammed in a partially underground warehouse next to the city’s wastewater treatment plant, sheet music packed the 3,000-square-foot cement building on 81 Library Lane almost as soon as it was built in 1981.
The library has no air conditioning or humidity control, no space for group meetings and an inadequate number of power outlets.
Chatfield Brass Band Inc. first requested state funds to renovate the warehouse.
When the Legislature’s capital investment committee toured the library, Chatfield Brass Band Inc. president Theresa Hayden said they were shocked at the lackluster facility but impressed at the collection.
“We’re obviously not a well-funded organization asking for a frivolous project,” Hayden said. “We are part of the arts infrastructure for southeastern Minnesota. … We provide a service to the music world no one else can provide.”
The tour prompted state Rep. Ken Tschumper, DFL-La Crescent, to sponsor a $400,000 proposal to build a new library in place of the Chosen Valley Elementary School on Main Street, which the school district plans to tear down after a new school is built at a different site.
Additional funding for the estimated $815,000 project costs would be sourced through grants, Hayden said.
The Main Street location would increase visibility and accessibility, Hayden said, considering it’s next to a band shell in the city park, where the Chatfield Brass Band performs its weekly summer concert series.
Tschumper said the proposal was the only Fillmore County construction project in the $925 million bonding bill. It would spur economic development for local construction companies and create a new destination for Root River State Trail users, he said.
“It’s such a gem in the rough,” he said.
Pawlenty chastised the Legislature for ignoring his repeated warnings for fiscal discipline. His 54 line-item vetoes in the bonding bill prioritized important projects without jeopardizing the state’s credit rating and interest rates, he said.
Pawlenty found it “inconceivable” legislators would fund a brass band musical lending library over a new nursing home facility at the Minneapolis Veterans Home.
Tschumper grumbled Pawlenty went out of his way to make a “big stink” over the legitimacy of the Chatfield lending library project, while backing four hockey arenas totaling $74 million.
“I can understand why some of these projects got vetoed when you’re looking at all of the $4 billion dollars of bonding projects across the state,” said state Sen. Sharon Erickson Ropes, DFL-Winona. “But the governor was particularly picking on the Chatfield Brass Band, and I got my hometown feathers ruffled.”
Like many other Democrats reeling from the governor’s cuts, Tschumper called Pawlenty and his cuts “inconsistent and hypocritical.”
Ropes said the majority of the governor’s cuts were in Democratic districts. She said Pawlenty failed to see the bill’s bipartisanship.
“He seems to be on the national campaign trail,” she said.
Library founder and trombonist James Perkins, who died in 1990, started the library in 1971. The Chatfield Brass Band needed music but had no money. Perkins asked area schools for discards, promising the band would make the music available to other bands.
Perkins stored the sheet music in wooden containers in his attic. By 1975, the growing collection moved to the basement of Chatfield City Hall. The library eventually overflowed into basement hallways, offices and shower stalls until moving into its current location.
Contact reporter Amber Dulek at amber.dulek@lee.net or (507) 453-3513.
