The downtown might play host to a temporary library after all,
but the city will reveal neither the exact location being
considered nor how it plans to get out of its current lease, which
started earlier this month.
The downtown might play host to a temporary library after all, but the city will reveal neither the exact location being considered nor how it plans to get out of its current lease, which started earlier this month.
The city is in negotiations with downtown developer Gary Walton to purchase one of his properties downtown to house the library’s volumes while the current library at 7387 Rosanna St. is razed and a new library built in its place. Walton owns a 10,000-square-foot reinforced concrete building with parking near Monterey and Third streets, as well as a building on Fourth Street, but would not say which one is the city’s top choice.
Regardless of the exact location, having the library downtown – where the vacancy rate is at least 50 percent, Walton said – would help revive the city’s vital core, he said.
“I think that it would add to the foot traffic downtown,” Walton said. “I think that it is a more convenient location for kids to get to. It’s along the bus lines. It’s near the existing library. One-thousand-two-hundred people a day going to the library is equivalent to a small department store. It’s a traffic generator.”
Yet, the City Council approved a temporary library in June at a warehouse on Leavesley Road near Swanston Lane in north Gilroy. The lease with Robert’s Construction Company, which came under fire because the warehouse was far removed from downtown, started Aug. 1 and runs through July 31, 2012, at a cost of nearly $135,000 a year.
City Engineer Richard Smelser said the city re-opened the search for a new temporary library site in response to questions that arose at the June city council meeting and Walton’s insistence that he owned a suitable building.
However, the city would not reveal how it planned to get out of the lease.
“In general, the only way to get out of the lease would be a breach of one of the parties,” said Christina Turner, city finance director and treasurer. “We can’t cite a breach yet, because there is not a substantiated breach at this point.”
Still, the city is forging ahead with considering a downtown site, said Councilman Dion Bracco, who serves on the Santa Clara County Library Joint Powers Authority with 10 other public officials. City staff and library officials toured one of Walton’s properties in July.
“That’s the only site that we know of that would actually work,” he said. “It’s not in the heart of downtown, so it wouldn’t clog up downtown. It has the parking. It’s 10,000 square feet.”
The deal is far from set, though, Walton said.
“We’re still going through the process of making sure that it’s going to work,” he said. “We’re doing some preliminary drawings.”
Walton would need three months to make all of the improvements necessary for the library to utilize the building, he said. Library staff would take another six weeks to move their collections to the site, which means the old library would still be on still on track for demolition in December or January. The new library would be built on the same site and ready to open in the summer of 2012.
The money for the lease and construction comes from the $37 million bond voters approved last November.
Councilman Craig Gartman has been a proponent of bringing the temporary library to the heart of the city. Gartman and Councilman Perry Woodward voted against the Leavesley site recommendation from the county library board in June.
“Anything to try to bring people downtown,” Gartman said. “Businesses have been hurting since we shut down the downtown to rebuild the street. If there’s a way to bring people downtown to patronize the library and the businesses, I think it would be beneficial to business owners down there.”
If an agreement is reached between Walton and the city, the decision will go before City Council on Sept. 14.
