YORKTON - So the city receives an offer on the building it owns that happens to house the public library -- should they accept it?
The offer might have came out of the blue but Council at least took the time to go in-camera – property being one of the traditional items Council discusses behind closed doors, the others being specific personnel issues and anything of a legal nature – and discuss the offer.
According to a Public Notice which appeared in Yorkton This Week the offer is for $1.5 million, a significant but not exactly budget changing dollars.
And of course the city can’t look at the amount as a profit because they will have to house the library somewhere new, and there are going to be costs associated with the move and renovations to wherever they go, and when that’s all done they might have a few hundred thousand to the good.
Is that enough to move forward?
That takes some analyzing.
To start Mayor Mitch Hippsley said Council is looking at the Gallagher Centre.
That is where the library should have been located when the big expansion took place, but Council of the day grew concerned with growing costs and the library stayed where it is now.
But had it been added back then it would have been a new build.
Now Council seems willing to simply shoehorn the library into the only space it has available.
The provincial recommendation – not regulation – for a library serving a community the size of Yorkton is 10,000 square feet, said Hippsley.
The existing library is 16,000 square feet.
The space at the Gallagher Centre is 6,000 square feet, said Hippsley. He added while the space is only about one-third the existing facility, the plan, if the sale goes forward, would be to spend some of the sale dollars to renovate the prospective space to make it as efficient as possible.
“We don’t want to lose any services,” said Hippsley.
Now how you maintain all the elements of the current library in one-third the space is a huge question?
Does the pARTners Gallery get chopped? Do you lose the meeting rooms used by groups from the Yorkton Film Festival to the bridge club to author readings? The kids’ playroom? The history room?
Hippsley has said they will have a proper design done. Great, but that should be done before you sell the existing building, or you are forced to take what can be crammed in 6,000 square feet.
The Gallagher Centre location would offer the City operational savings. The cost to operate the existing building -- utilities, snow removal etc -- is in excess of $185,000 per year,
Now here is where it gets interesting. The $1.5 from the sale gets the ball rolling on a new library build at the Gallagher Centre. The $185K will drop in a new space, the savings become part of a payment on the build, along with the $60,000 in taxes from the new owner of the old library building.
And certainly a new build is possible financially considering at a recent meeting Council was told the city’s external borrowing was less than $4 million at present, with Yorkton having a provincially approved option to take on up to $42 million in borrowing.
Yes, there are costs on the horizon, like the oft-mentioned new hospital, but Council has begun a long-overdue levy – a hospital has been talked about for years and a levy instituted at day one of discussions would have created a significant reserve for the project by now – to help defray at least some costs to the city.
And, if millions can be invested for a golf clubhouse for generally a very specific user group – many non-residents of the city – then funding an appropriately sized library to support its rather broad range of resident users needs to be considered.
Don’t want to build new, then an outside-the-box option to avoid the library being squished into limited space would be for the city to get out of competition with private and church halls and convert the convention centre into additional library room. Build in the Sport Hall of Fame area and co-op to have the curling lounge open to readers in some fashion, and you create a rather interesting community hub.
In an email to YTW Hippsley also noted there have been some security concerns at the existing location and safety of staff and patrons is top of mind. That is unfortunate but had a much earlier Council not retracted a plan to locate the library across from City Hall, opting to sell that building to become the first casino security would be an RCMP presence across the street.
Yes, the library has been a much-fumbled football by Councils past.
But, past fumbles are likely to pale significantly from the shoe box library hidden away on the upper floor of the Gallagher Centre that seems likely to happen unless Council finds a much bolder vision for its future.
