There’s a temptation to make mountains out of molehills like the one rising up between Mars Library Board and Adams Township supervisors.

The tiff, over who gets to pick the library’s board members, surfaced at a library board meeting two weeks ago, where Adams Supervisor Thomas Franceschina paid a visit to introduce township manager Gary Peaco as the municipality’s liaison to the library board.

While there, Franceschina mentioned a recent letter from the township’s solicitor to the library board. That letter included a recommendation that the library cede its authority to appoint board trustees to Adams and the other municipalities that contribute tax dollars to it.

Franceschina’s visit did not sit well with the library board trustees. They returned his gesture this week by visiting Monday’s township supervisors meeting en masse to take issue with the suggestion of letting anyone else decide their board appointments.

“We are a private, not-for-profit company,” library board member Steven Chadwick said, “so ceding authority ... sounds a lot like total abrogation of the entity by the township. And I just wanted to make sure that that was what you guys really wanted to do.”

Chadwick is absolutely right about this. What does the typical township supervisor know about running a library? Adding a political element to the selection process does not in any way suggest an improved efficiency or effectiveness in a public library’s operations.

But at the same time, municipal officials like Franceschina have genuine concerns about the continued relevance of small-town libraries — and they need assurances that the tax dollars they’re entrusted to appropriate are not being squandered.

Consider the following statement, a preamble on the mission of public libraries, posted by the Online Community Library Center (oclc.org) a national library cooperative: “Public libraries perform unique and critical roles in their communities. These roles evolve and change with the needs of the people they serve, and they often include economic development, adult and early childhood literacy, support for government programs and more. In response to local funding pressures and the changing needs of their users, public libraries work with OCLC to automate back-office activities, improve services for users and increase the impact of public libraries as a whole.”

In other words, libraries like Mars must be much more than the 27,000 to 28,000 books, CDs, videos and other catalogued items on its shelves. To remain relevant in a global society, it must be an integral source and conduit of information and resources for everything from employment and education to home improvement, recipes and every form of physical, spiritual and intellectual fulfillment.

As residents and taxpayers, we exercise a formal ownership over libraries — and also over municipal governments, to be fair about it. Annually, $250,000 of our county tax dollars go to the Butler County Federated Library System, which includes Mars as a member. That’s in addition to the local tax dollars given to the individual libraries by muncipalities like Adams.

There is, at least, an implied obligation to assure the taxpayer that this money is being used most effectively. That is, library boards must clearly communicate assurances to the officials who are elected to represent the voting, tax-paying public to spend their tax money on community causes.

And to be additionally clear, municipal government boards as well as nonprofit boards supported with tax dollars must communicate effectively about their mission, words and actions. Under pressure from fellow supervisor Russ Ford, Frankeschina admitted his comments to the library board were his own opinion and did not represent any formal action taken by the supervisors. He apparently did not make that distinction at the earlier library board meeting. He should have.

The public really does not care who sits on the library boards, as long as their community library is effectively accomplishing its mission.