Board of Trustees to Pursue Single Building Options

At their regular Board Meeting in March, the Library Board of Trustees decided unanimously to pursue only single building options for the library's future expansion. The planning process began with an update to the 2008 Space Needs Analysis, a statistical overview of the Library's position among its peers according to current and projected service populations on the local, regional and national levels. This information guides an estimated space need for the projected service population. The next step is to create a building program, which an architect will use to guide development of a building design. The building program translates the Library's overall space need into specific types of space like meeting rooms, shelving areas and computer work areas.

Four major factors were discussed in the decision to pursue only single building options:

1. Overall operational costs are significantly more for two buildings.
2. It is a long term cost commitment to operation of two buildings.
3. In an ideal situation, a branch would be located in the northwest quadrant of the library's service area. But our situation is not ideal. A "starter" service point could be used, like the pick up lockers and drop box service points utilized by some other libraries.
4. This library has never passed an operating tax rate increase, even when it expanded from 2,700 sq ft to 27,000 sq ft.

So I now have at least one firm answer to "what's the plan for expansion?" So far, the plan is one building - everything else is still open to any possibility.