January-March 1941 — Cut us loose from the south side
By the beginning of 1941 the north side's problem was no longer money, or sites, or the council. Its problem was the south side.
The 1938 referendum had tied the two buildings together: by its terms they were to be constructed at the same time. The south side's program had run into difficulties — they could not get ground broken — and so long as the two were bound, the north side waited.
"the two buildings would be constructed at the same time"
— The La Crosse Tribune, January 17, 1941, describing the earlier referendum
On Thursday, January 16, 1941, the Business Men's Club met at noon and resolved to ask the city council to put a second referendum on the ballot that April — one that would authorize prompt construction of the north side branch on its own, without waiting for the south. The recommendation came from the club's library committee: the Rev. H. R. Kinley and Prof. H. G. Hayden.
The site named in the proposal was the corner of Avon and Sill.
The same meeting fixed the club's next gathering for the sixth of February, at the new No. 4 fire station — the building that had gone to the PWA alongside the two libraries in 1938, and had since been built.
The fire station they had asked for together was finished. The libraries were not.
Three weeks later the council took it up. On the evening of Saturday, February 8, 1941, the common council committees met at city hall and made tentative plans to put a branch library construction bond issue to the voters of La Crosse that spring. They instructed City Clerk Fred L. Kramer to secure the initial resolutions from Chapman and Cutler of Chicago — the same bond attorneys the council had engaged in August 1938, asked now to do the work a second time.
In the course of the same evening the aldermen heard the Business Men's Club resolution favoring construction, and the detailed reports of the Chamber of Commerce's investigating committee. Four years of argument, two organizations and eight typewritten pages arrived in one room on one night.
One obstacle remained, and it was in Madison. The legislature had not passed a law permitting part payment of real estate taxes, and without it the necessary resolutions could not be approved. The committees went on record in favor of such a law, in a resolution offered by Alderman A. R. Kempter. They hoped the state would act before their meeting on the fourteenth.
Kempter had twice tried to put the north side's library inside Logan High School, and had been beaten by a single vote. Three years on, he was the alderman carrying the resolution that would let it be paid for.
The legislature did not act in time, and the February meeting came and went. On the evening of Thursday, March 6, 1941, the council committees sat again at city hall. The Business Men's Club had written to them, urging that the north side branch be built under the bond issue proposal even if the south side ran into further delay — the same argument the club had made in January, now in writing.
The committees decided the letter was to be filed.
"is to be filed, it was decided"
— The La Crosse Tribune, March 7, 1941
It was the phrase this story had heard before. In April 1934 the council had taken Otto Merman's drawings for the north side branch and ordered them placed on file, and nothing had come of them for three years. Now the same thing happened to the letter.
Then the aldermen turned to the resolutions for a library construction bond issue — by this point $110,000 for the work — discussed them for a while, and deferred their recommendations to a later meeting, in order to determine the legal requirements.