At the Township

The day Moon Township proposed taking over its library, its own minutes recorded: "None"

Ten years of free rent are running out, the Township has offered to take the the library over. Both boards kept minutes, and they do not tell the same story.

Moon Pulse · 31 August 2026 · every figure checked against the source record

Some years ago Moon Township sold the building on Beaver Grade Road to the Moon Township Municipal Authority, and the library that occupies part of it was given ten years of free rent as part of the deal. By February 2023 the library's trustees were writing in their own minutes that they were "on year 5 of the 10-year lease." The arithmetic is not complicated, and everyone involved has been doing it for a while.

What happens when the free rent ends is the question underneath everything else. The Township holds no lease with the library — Township Manager Dawn Lane told the Board of Supervisors plainly in February 2024 that "the Township does not currently have a lease." The building belongs to a third body. And in April 2025, when Lane asked the Municipal Authority what the future would cost, the answer that came back was square footage plus utilities. Supervisor Mary Jo Wise put it on the record at that meeting: "the township would be charged for the square footage plus utilities."

The library had already priced its alternatives. In June 2023 its building committee reported a commercial landlord willing to sell or lease space at the Gander Mountain complex — $30,000 a month to rent. Renovating the rooms it already occupies was put at $2.3 to $2.5 million. Neither figure is a plan. Both are why the next three years happened.

None of this is new ground between the two boards. The Township's record — 258 separate mentions of the library across fourteen years — is largely a record of money and of the building. In 2014 the library board asked the Township for a fifty per cent commitment to its expansion. In 2015 the supervisors went into executive session on the library lease agreement under advice of counsel. From 2016 to 2020 the Township's contribution held flat at $184,000 a year. In February 2021 Lane told the board the Township supports 53 per cent of the library's budget.

And the supervisors have not been uniformly hostile. In April 2023 the minutes record Supervisor Allan Bross asking "the board members if they are opposed to giving the library additional funding," then requesting copies of the library's reports, books and audits for review. That October the allocation rose by $15,272 to $199,272.

In December 2022, when residents came to public comment about rumours the board intended to "get rid of the library," supervisors said they had no intention of defunding it or of banning books. At that same meeting Supervisor David Bachman explained the arrangement — the Township "used to own the Municipal Authority building and then sold it to the MTMA," and "the Library has free rent for 10-years." Supervisor Albert Quaye stated the position plainly: "The Library is a separate entity. The Township has no authority on how the library operates, however they do help fund the library."

Two months later, something else appears — in the library's minutes, and nowhere in the Township's. "Dawn Lane gave a courtesy phone call to Heather about the Board of Supervisors initiating a study to merge with other libraries and closing the Moon Library," the trustees recorded on February 22, 2023. "Heather" is Library Director Heather Panella. Whether such a study was ever commissioned, the public record does not say. It is recorded once, by one body, about a conversation between two people, in the same year the Township was debating whether to give the library more money. That is worth stating precisely rather than dramatically: it is a claim in a minute book, not a finding.

Through 2023 the library was not waiting to be told what would happen to it. Its April minutes record a recap of a supervisors' meeting listing four options: the Airport Business Park, "by casa amigos"; the Diamond Ridge property, with the trustees' own note asking whether it was "too far to one edge of town"; remaining and renovating, with "no word on feasibility of expanding the library"; and building new, which the minutes record as "not supported by majority." Supervisor Vitale, the minutes say, suggested knowing by the end of May.

By February 2024 the supervisors were circling the lease directly. The agenda item was an "MTPL Lease addendum for Sq. Footage"; Lane confirmed the Township had no lease; Wise said the library was "looking for a commitment from the township" and that "all ideas are on the table"; Bachman said they needed to set up a meeting with the Library Board.

That meeting, when it came, was the turning point — and it is recorded on the library's side. On August 28, 2024, Supervisor James Vitale came to the library's building committee "representing the Moon Township Board of Supervisors" and presented the trustees and Director Panella with "an option/feasibility of becoming a Dept. of the" Township. Much discussion followed, the minutes note, about operations, employees, benefits and finances. Then the detail that started the clock: at Panella's request, the supervisors "granted a one year time frame from this point" for the trustees to research the question and decide.

That is the library's account. The Township kept minutes of its own workshop two days later, on August 28, 2024 — and under the standing agenda item for the library, its record reads in full:

Report: C. Moon Township Public Library — None

Nothing about a proposal. Nothing about a department. Nothing about a one-year clock. A resident reading the Township's own minutes that week would have learned that there was nothing to report about the library, on the day a member of that board had asked its trustees to consider dissolving it.

On Saturday, November 23, 2024, the trustees met by video. Two days later Wise reported on that meeting to her fellow supervisors. Both bodies wrote it down, and they wrote down different things. The library's minutes record that "Supervisors to discuss all of the possible scenarios if the library becomes a Township Department. An approach to discuss will be facilitated." The Township's minutes record that "Ms. Wise stated she requested to have a discussion on how the Library Board felt about the Township taking over the library. Ms. Wise stated that Ms. Emmerling shut it down and requested to have a meeting in February to discuss it." One book records a plan to talk. The other records a refusal to. Neither is untrue, and the gap between them is the story.

By March 2025 the proposal had specifics, and reassuring ones. The library's minutes record Lane and Bachman assuring trustees that day-to-day operations would stay with the library director, that the director would keep control of personnel, and that no staff member would be asked to reapply for their job. An advisory board would be created, modelled on the one that oversees Parks. The library's financial assets "would be sequestered for library use only." It would stop paying for its own accounting and gain Township staff and the solicitor to chase grants. The same minutes carry the target — a governance takeover in December 2026 — and the mechanism, which leaves the decision with the trustees rather than the Township: the Board of Trustees "would require unanimous vote to dissolve."

Three months later the committee chair told the trustees the other side was ready. "Supervisors are ready to take over library; however, board needs to vote to dissolve," Wise reported on June 18, 2025, chairing the library's own Building and Library Transition Committee.

On June 25, 2025, the library's president invoked an emergency provision of the bylaws to call a vote by email: release $3,000 to retain a law firm — independent legal advice for a board being asked to dissolve itself. It failed, four votes to three. Voting to disapprove were Nolfi, Wink, Wise and Stachel; voting to approve, Diehl, Madonna-Emmerling and Buchanan. "Motion did not pass, no action was taken," the minutes record.

Among the four voting against retaining counsel was Mary Jo Wise — a Township supervisor, chair of the library's transition committee, and the person who had told that same board a week earlier that the supervisors were ready.

She sits on both bodies, and the record of how she got there is worth reading closely. At the Township's reorganisation meeting on January 6, 2025, the supervisors moved to reappoint Barbara Nolfi and Mary Jo Wise to the Moon Township Public Library Board of Trustees, to the first Monday in January 2028. The motion carried. The minutes list the votes in favour: James Vitale, John Hertzer, David Bachman, Albert Quaye — and Mary Jo Wise. She is recorded voting to appoint herself. That is not an accusation. Supervisors commonly serve as liaisons to authorities and boards, and this appointment was made in the open. But a reader following the argument should know which chair a person is speaking from, and on this question Wise has been speaking from two.

Three weeks after that failed vote, on July 16, 2025, the trustees met at the Robin Hill Carriage House and the room was not quiet. Kathy Woodruff, who said she had been affiliated with the library since 1985, asked how it would be funded, how the lease would be guaranteed, and what data supported the decision — the library, she noted, was already well used. Joseph Kranyak, a former trustee, argued that dissolving before receiving a fiscal plan from the Township would breach the board's fiduciary responsibility. Ellen Northy, a Friend of the library, asked why the Township did not simply fund it properly now, as other municipalities do.

Wise's answer to the central question was the honest one available to her, and it is not a comfortable sentence: "Library may not be able to sustain under new lease agreement. Library would not afford to maintain on their own."

Not every trustee saw a threat. Rochelle Stachel made the affirmative case — that the library needs to "advance and grow," that the board and the Friends cannot raise enough for real growth in business and technology alone, and that Township backing could supply it. Of the evening's public comment she said: "I think this is fearmongering." The meeting ended with a motion from Wise to research qualified legal counsel to advise on the transition. That one passed.

What happens next is mostly what does not happen. Through the autumn of 2025 the transition plan sits with the library's building committee, which proposes taking it into executive session "at another time when all members are present." In October the board does exactly that: a motion by Wise, seconded by Wink, closes the meeting at 6:30 p.m.; it reopens at 7:22. On the Township's side the door had closed earlier still — in May, Lane told the supervisors simply that "the discussion will take place in executive session." Pennsylvania's Sunshine Act permits closed sessions for legal and real-estate matters, and both bodies invoked them.

Then 2026 arrives and the library board starts behaving like an organisation that expects to still be here — and starts arguing with itself about how it is run.

In May, Trustee Patricia Zusinas submitted a memorandum raising what the minutes summarise as "procedural issues, lack of collaboration and need for ethical governance," and asking that the Strategic Committee be restored to a committee of the whole. President Rochelle Stachel filed a formal response. There was discussion, the minutes record, "surrounding the fact that three members do not violate the Sunshine law," and comment "that it is within the President's rights to appoint a committee." The motion to restore the committee was put and lost, four votes to three — Yes: Zusinas, Heller, Vitale; No: DeWitt, Nolfi, Stachel, Wise.

Alongside that, it adds a governance committee. It appoints a strategic planning committee with residents on it and hires a consultant. It runs a community survey — 215 people respond, asking for more large-print books and a tutoring room. In April its treasurer reports current assets of $1.3 million, up from $1.1 million the previous summer. In July and August it discusses and votes on a 2027 draft budget of its own, and on revised mission and vision statements. No vote to dissolve appears in any published minutes. The December 2026 target is three months away, and the last three agendas — June, July and August 2026 — carry no transition item at all.

One caveat matters about that silence. The library publishes its agendas within days and its minutes about three months later. Agendas exist through August 11, 2026; minutes stop at May 12. The June, July and August meetings are unwritten, not empty. Nothing here should be read as proof that no vote occurred — only that none appears in the record as published.

There is one more thing in the Township's record, and it is not in the minutes at all. It is in the financial reports attached to the 2026 agenda packets, on budget line 0456-530, CONTRIBUTION-LIBRARY.

The figures there run $289,998, then $207,243, then $213,460 — a prior year's actual followed by two budgeted years, the percentages in the same row confirming which is which. Whatever the reasons, the direction is not in doubt: the Township's contribution to the library fell by roughly $82,000, about 28 per cent, across the same period in which it was proposing to take the library over and the trustees were being told the library "would not afford to maintain on their own."

The minutes do not reconcile those numbers, and neither body appears to have discussed the drop in public. The library, for its part, was asking for increases: a 4 per cent rise for 2025 worth $7,970.88, and before that an August 2023 request for roughly 8 per cent a year. In January 2022 its treasurer described the Township's support as "approximately $46,000 quarterly" — which is $184,000 a year, the figure that held from 2016 to 2020.

Read the Township's minutes alone and almost none of this exists. Its record of the library is not thin: 258 mentions across fourteen years, busiest in 2023 and 2024, covering the lease, the square footage, the funding and the building. What it does not contain is the proposal. There is no motion, no resolution and no recorded decision creating a library department. The one-year deadline, the December 2026 target, the assurances about staff and assets, the unanimous-vote mechanism, the failed vote on legal counsel and the entire public argument all sit in the minutes of the body being asked to dissolve itself. On the Township side the subject appears as a two-sentence committee report in March 2025 and then goes into executive session in May.

That asymmetry is not necessarily improper. A township is under no obligation to legislate a proposal it has only offered, and a proposal made to another board is that board's business to minute. But the practical effect is worth naming: a resident who followed the Board of Supervisors — read the agendas, attended the meetings, watched on MCA-TV — would have had almost no way to learn that the future of the library was being decided, or that a clock had been started on deciding it.

Five things the record cannot answer. No executed lease appears anywhere, so the end date is unsettled — "year 5" in early 2023 points to 2028, "four more years left" in April 2025 points to 2029. Whether the 2023 merger study was ever real is recorded once, in a library minute, about a phone call. What was said in at least four executive sessions, on both sides, is not public. What the Township will actually be charged after the free-rent period, and who ultimately pays it, has not been stated. And the last three library board meetings have not been written up.

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