PRESS RELEASE
The ribbon cutting ceremony for the new Wasilla Public Library building will take place on Thursday, 9/22/2016, at 2:00pm at the new library building, located at 500 North Crusey Street in downtown Wasilla.
The total cost for the new library building is $15 million. Special thanks goes to the voters of Wasilla, who passed a 1 cent sales tax increase which began January 1, 2014, and ran through December 31, 2015, at the time when $15 million was available through a combination of sales tax collections and donated funds from other organizations and sources.
“It has been the vision of the Friends of the Wasilla Public Library that the new facility will be a center of the community; a beautiful place for people to come together to learn and celebrate the joy of learning. It has been central to this project to include the community in building this library,” stated Jeanne Troshynski, Friends of Wasilla Public Library President, “Through the sales tax, capital campaign and generous donations this library truly belongs to both the residents of Wasilla and the residents of the Mat-Su Borough who shop here.”
The new library building would not be possible without the support of the City of Wasilla: the Matanuska-Susitna Borough with support from the Matanuska-Susitna School Board, the state of Alaska, the Rasmuson Foundation. the Foraker Group and the Mat-Su Health Foundation to purchase health related library materials or the approximately 400 community businesses and individual supporters who have made generous contributions to the new library building’s Capital Campaign, which is ongoing until December.
The Wasilla Library has been serving the greater Wasilla community for over seventy-eight years. Founded with a collection of ninety-one books by the Wasilla Library Association on January 23, 1938, the library has been housed in its current building on Main Street since 1978. The association transferred its library holdings, ownership and property of the library to the City of Wasilla in 1986.