VIDALIA — The voters of Concordia Parish braved the hot July weather to cast their votes to renew the 10-year, 8.5-mil library tax.

We are very, very proud and we’re very happy it’s over and we appreciate all our people who voted for it,” said Amanda Taylor, head librarian for the Concordia Parish Library.

Passing with an overwhelming 88.7 percent, 1,158 votes were cast for the renewal to the 147 cast against it.

Taylor said she was on edge all day Saturday as voters trickled in and out of the precincts.

“I never took it for granted, we had to wait and see,” she said.

She said she feels the education effort the library put out helped get the votes for it.

“We went to every town hall, we did a lot of club programs,” Taylor said.

In addition to that, she said the library put out information booklets at all the circulation desks and they created a Power Point slide show to show the public how the tax money is spent.

The millage provides close to 93 percent of the library’s funding.

It’s in the form of an ad valorem tax and is only applied to houses worth $75,000 or more.

“This millage is 93 percent of our budget,” she said.

The funds accrued go for the operations of the public library.

“It pays for buying all the materials, programming, artists and guests, it pays for running all the four services,” she said. “We had to have it passed in order to continue operations.

“It was very important and critical to us continuing our services.”

She said for the people who voted against it probably just didn’t understand the situation.

“People a lot of time are anti-millage,” she said. “This was not a new tax and it was not an increase, it was a straight renewal.”

Minutes after the final results came out, Taylor said the library will continue for the next 10 years to provide top services for the community.

“Not only are we books and DVDs, but we have lots of technology that we offer the public and we also do a tremendous amount of programs,” Taylor said. “Libraries offer so many more things than they used to.”

Had the vote not passed, she said the library could have operated for seven or eight more months.

She said the library would have had to wait six more months to get the vote back on a ballot.

“We would have had to have gone back to the voters again,” she said.