Rather than cobbling a new expansion onto an old building, the Belleville Area District Library Board voted on Tuesday to build a new, two-story, 30,000-square-foot, energy-efficient library building and tear the old one down.
Several board members said they were impressed by the comments of retired architect George Craven who spoke at a recent meeting. Craven had designed the new addition to the old library building years back and he said now the community deserves an all-new building. Both Craven and the present architect Dan Whisler used the term “cobbled” when referring to new construction on old.
Three board members were absent from Tuesday’s vote, but they all said they were in favor of Option C – the all-new building.
There was a report from the Nov. 25 meeting with city officials who discussed details of the library placement. The board wants to build the new library in the middle of Fourth Street and the city was OK with that, as long as Fourth Street was left open from Main Street to the alley.
Paul Stauder, financial advisor, showed preliminary figures to help plan a bond vote for November 2016. And, architect Whisler said he could start drawing up what the library would look like. The front door would likely be visible from Main Street – or, maybe not.
Design is the next step and then selling the project to the public. The library board has reduced the size of the building and kept it downtown. Maybe this will work.
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2 Comments
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Why do you keep spending money? The voters already said NO to this project and you keep hiring architects to draw up plans. If you keep spending money on land, drawings etc….you’re going to have to ask the voters for money just to stay open, and that will be turned down too. Stop digging yourself a hole that you can’t get out of!
What is sad is that the city wants to build an all new library when their own city hall, police station, and fire station are literally falling apart. When someone walks into the city buildings I don’t blame them if the first thing they do is turn right back around and walk out due to how terrible and run down they are. Maybe if the city didn’t decide to spend even more money on sculptures it could of gone to improve or replace the city buildings such as the city hall, police station and fire station. If I worked at city hall I’d be disgusted to come into work every day and see a nasty building falling apart. This city has do much potential downtown to look like the beautiful cities of Saline and Plymouth but instead the city decides to run itself into the ground. Then they will ask the tax payers to clean up the mess.