March 14, 1941 — Necessary and feasible
The council met that night, March 14, 1941, and the cut to $75,000 was not made. Chapman and Cutler had been clear: the introductory resolution had to be adopted in exactly the form in which it was first presented and published for the voters, or the state statutes would not be satisfied. So it went forward whole.
The resolution declared it necessary and feasible to construct the branch libraries. A second document set the referendum for the first of April.
Alderman A. R. Kempter introduced it. He read into the record a letter from the La Crosse Building and Construction Trades council and another from the La Crosse Federation of Teachers, both favoring the referendum — and a third, from the board of education, opposing any branch library built on the Logan school property. The council took no action on the last. It did not need to. The idea that had been argued twice from the floor in 1938 and put in writing again in March 1941 was finished, and the man who had championed it was the one who read out its refusal.
There was little discussion. Alderman Leonard Schultz cast the only opposing vote.
"necessary and feasible"
— the Common Council of La Crosse, March 14, 1941
The question going to the people was advisory, not binding: whether the city should issue not to exceed $110,000 in bonds for two branch libraries, one in the northern section of the city and one in the extreme southern district. If the work came in under that figure, the bonds would be written to the contracts and not to the ceiling.
Four years and six days after the library board's fourth request, the north side had a date.
On March 21, 1941, the city clerk published the notice. F. L. Kramer — the same clerk the committees had sent to the bond attorneys in February — set out the proposition in the form the electors would see it.
"Shall the City of La Crosse issue its general obligation Library Bonds in the principal sum of not exceeding $110,000 for the purpose of constructing two public municipal branch libraries in and for said City?"
Underneath it ran the polling places, ward by ward, twenty-one of them. Read as a list it is the whole argument laid out as a map. The eighth ward voted at the West Avenue playground, where the cramped south branch stood. The ninth voted at Logan High School, the building some of them had wanted the library put inside. The nineteenth voted at Jefferson School, on St. James and Caledonia, a few minutes' walk from the rented room with the partition down the middle.
And the tenth ward voted at Franklin School, on the corner of Kane and Gillette.
The polls would open at seven in the morning and close at eight at night.