Note: The agenda and minutes list the meeting date as April 15, 2026, but the user-provided instruction specifies the meeting occurred on April 20, 2026. This summary follows the user-provided date.
The Rochester Library Board held a regular meeting on April 20, 2026, at 5:27 p.m. (adjournment time from source). All eight present members voted unanimously on all items; Leah Baethke was absent. The board received updates from partner organizations, approved consent agenda items including $150,094.90 in accounts payable, accepted the annual review of Library Director Karen Lemke, approved a Teen Library Council pilot project, updated four policies, adopted strategic plan measurements, and approved both a marketing plan and a data collection plan for the downtown parking pilot.
Rochester Public Library Board meeting. You can attend the data here in person in the library auditorium or stream the meeting by the library search channel. And the recording will be made available after meeting on the city's website. Other any public comments. Alright. Roll call for it. Emily is present. Here. Yeah. Here, Steve. All three feet. Okay, I have a motion to approve the agenda as presented. Thank you. All in favor. Motion is all right, motion passes. Rochester Public Library Foundation. It has been. So we have a new website started today, just like the library, and is RPLMN Foundation, which is kind of a mouthful. So we also got a secondary URL, lovemyrpl.org, which will be easier to communicate when we're, you know, on radio or T or something like that. We are looking to into the possibility of developing quarterly Enutha newsletters because the mailing is going away. And I'll be looking for library advocates and library lovers to highlight. So I'm looking at you guys. I might send you an invitation and see if you might want to talk about maybe why you joined the library board and why you think it's a great resource behind here. We also have new board members. We have four new board members. And Christy is from Premier Bank, Minnesota. Zachary is from IBM, Michael is from Mayo, and Jessica is from Eagle Rock Bank. We're working on our summer business assets and patron letter. We're working on RPO with a youth designated donor gift, but we're really excited to see how that's gonna take shape in the youth services area. And we'll be moving our board meetings to even ones that we can have both cross-bome stream. And I do really want to give a big shout out to Jeremiah because he's put on a lot of work on our website, the library website, and the friends website. I know he was working late nights and weekend hours, so if you have a chance to, please think too. Does anybody have any questions? Hi, I'm Val Kalashewski, President of the Friends, and uh like Brenda mentioned with the foundation. The Friends also has a new website. Um at launched today. Uh our URL is RPOMN friends.org. Um also, yes, thank you to Jeremiah for porting our original web pages from our old website onto the new one to get us started. Um then also um Pat Stevenson is our very creative, long-standing volume TO just loves selling things, and she came to asked me uh a couple of weeks ago. She said, Do you think I can have a sale in Bookmobile Garage? And I said, I don't know, I'll ask. And so I asked Jeremiah and he's like, I'm not sure we ever did that. And I said, um, yes, we have. Uh, when this building was first built, they thought with the store we weren't going to need to have large sales anymore. Well, within a year and a half, they had so much inventory that they couldn't move it through the store. We had um sale in the bookmobile garage in conjunction with Rochester First, and they did that for 11 years before we finally got permission to move all of our book sales here in the auditorium. So we did get permission. Um Pat has been collecting things that are not books. Um, and there's a city wide garage sale going on that same weekend. So Saturday, May 16 from 10 a.m.