GUILDERLAND — Three candidates are running unopposed to be trustees of the Guilderland Public Library: Nareen Rivas, Michael Marcantonio, and Barry Uznitsky Nelson.

The three open seats are currently held by:

— Niveen Rivas: Her term ends June 2018, and she is running for re-election;

— Michelle Viola-Straight: Her term ends June 2018, and she is not running; and

— Carolyn Williams: Her term was scheduled to end in June 2019. Her resignation in April due to health issues created a third open seat.

The top two vote-getters will serve full five-year terms, replacing the retiring trustees, while the candidate who comes in third will fill out the year remaining in Williams’s term, and then would need to run again to remain a trustee. The posts on the nine-member board are unpaid.

Rivas

Nareen Rivas is currently a stay-at-home mom to children Henry, 8, and Oliver, 4. Previously, she says, she worked in the field of special education for eight years in New York City.

She and her children visit the library often, she said, and attend a lot of programs. Serving on the board, she said, is a great way to give back to the library.

She is currently filling out the term of the late David Bosworth, and said that the other trustees have been very welcoming.

It has been a “great experience,” she said, with a steep learning curve. When people think of the library, they think of the books and the programs it offers, she said, but being on the board is “another level, an eye-opener, because you start to learn a lot about the business side of it” and what it takes to make the library to run well.

Her husband, Fredy Rivas, is an accountant for Excelsior College.

Now that her younger child will be starting school, Rivas hopes to go back to working outside the home soon.

Her last job, she said, was as an evaluation coordinator for children ages 1 to 3 who might need Individualized Education Plans. She liked that kind of work, she said, particularly because of its heavy writing component.

Rivas is “totally for” the proposed expansion of the library, she said, noting that the library is getting older.

“I think it will be a positive thing for the community, and make the library more accessible, because our programs have grown so much,” she said.

Rivas said that the expansion will make everyone more comfortable and create more space throughout the building.

She was asked — as The Enterprise traditionally does with library trustee candidates — to name her favorite book.

It’s hard to pick just one book, she said, offering two, both of them coming-of-age stories featuring strong female protagonists: “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” by Betty Smith, and “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee. Both, she said, are books she read many years ago that have always stayed with her.

Nelson

Barry Uznitsky Nelson is retired from his state work as a budget analyst and then a health-and-safety officer for all state buildings, which involved checking complaints, from “a weird odor, to emergency-exit doors being locked, and anything in between.”

He was one of the state workers called to help in the aftermath of the terrorists’ attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. He says he spent a couple of days a week in Manhattan for nine months.

Nelson, who is 65, has been a volunteer firefighter with the Westmere Fire Department for over 30 years, he says. As a firefighter, he says, he sees areas in the library “that could use improvement, not that there’s problems.”

Years ago, in the mid- to late-1980s, he said, he was president of the Friends of the Guilderland Free Library, and was very involved with the library then. Work and family concerns then intervened for many years, but now that his children are grown and he is retired, he says, “I have time to devote to the library.”

The library has seen a  lot of improvement since Timothy Wiles became director, Nelson said, adding that he would like to “be part of still more improvements.”

Guilderland’s library definitely needs expansion, he said, noting that he remembers the entire span of its growth, from the small collection in the basement of what is now Amedore Homes at 1900 Western Avenue, to the site across the street, at 1873 Western Ave., to the current site, with each of those moves representing an expansion.

“The library is a fantastic community asset. It gets used; it definitely needs to expand,” he said.

His only concern about the plan for expansion, he said, is that he wishes it included increased funds for the collection itself — “books, DVDs, whatever” — and not just for the physical building.

His favorite book is Isaac Asimov’s The Foundation trilogy, which he first read as a freshman in college. “It opened my mind to all these possibilities for humankind,” he said.

For many years, he read it annually, including reading it to his son, along with the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

“It shows what humanity at its best could be,” Nelson said.

Marcantonio

Michael Marcantonio has an engineering background and a degree in accounting and is retired from a 36-year career at Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory.

He has lived in Guilderland for the past 33 years, he said, and has been married for 35 years. He and his wife raised their two children in Guilderland, he said.

Marcantonio has been active for years with the town and with community functions, he said, including serving on the town’s zoning board of appeals, until 2015, and serving for the past two years or so on the Guilderland YMCA’s advisory council, which he said is like a board of directors. He is currently chairs the YMCA’s property committee, he said.

“I try to be active,” he said, reporting his age as “a young 63.”

He said that this is a good time to get involved, as the library works on a possible expansion.

“I believe I can identify community needs,” he said, “and build bridges within the community.” He said he would like to help “keep our library working in the 21st Century, really emphasizing programs for the kids and mature adults.”

Those two groups seem to be frequent users of the library, he said, adding, “When you go to the library, you see more of young kids coming in with their parents, and mature adults.”

Maybe a longer-term future goal, he said, could be to increase use of the library by  people between those age groups.

He is in favor of the expansion, which will make the facility “more accommodating to everybody’s needs, and more comfortable.”

The renovation will also make better use of the building’s most striking architectural feature — the clear line of sight from one end to the other, he said.

Marcontonio said that he reads a lot of health-related books, as well as titles on current events.

He said he recently read “Meditations for Fidgety Skeptics,” which he said showed how to use meditation to put “everything — your personality, your responses, how you deal with things” — into perspective. He has read all of the health- and diet-related books by David Zinczenko.

And he recently took out — from the library — Hillary Clinton’s book, “What Happened” as well as James Comey’s “A Higher Loyalty.”