Library wants public's input on future expansion
With the purchase of a house at 410 Kansas Ave. finalized earlier this month by the Beck-Bookman Library Board of Directors, the library’s leaders are looking to get the house demolished before considering any plans for the library’s expansion.
And when it’s time to make those plans, Librarian Candee Jacobs noted, library officials will look to the public for input.
“We’re waiting to get the building down. That’s our next step,” Jacobs said of demolishing the house that the library board purchased at a cost of $98,356 at a recent sheriff’s sale. “After it’s down, we’re going to look at what kind of space we have, and from a lot of different angles. Then we’ll start getting community input on what the public would like to see done.”
A demolition contractor has given the library a window of “two to six months” to have the house brought to ground, and while no definite date has been set for the demolition, Jacobs said she believed it would not take long.
“It would be nice to have a date for demolition,” she said. “We have to have the trees trimmed first, and the gas company has come out to shut their lines off. We’re just trying to get all the preliminary stuff out of the way, and we’re making progress.”
The current library facility, located at 420 W. Fourth St. in Holton, was built in 1952, it was reported. Since then, only one addition has been built onto the original structure — the library’s east wing, which Jacobs said provided the library with “more room for stacks, a little office space, restrooms and a furnace room,” was built in 1995.
In recent years, however, library officials have noted a need to mitigate “space constraints and challenges in our current building,” and the library board welcomed a donation of more than $300,000, to be set aside for the library’s expansion, from the estate of the late Willard Knowles following his death in 2008, Jacobs said. That donation has been earning interest since then, she added.
It’s most likely that the cost of construction of any new additions to the library would be covered by the Knowles fund, she said, rather than asking the city to increase its annual mill levy to the library. At present, the library receives a 5-mill designation in the city’s budget each year, and the library also receives funds from county and state sources, it was reported.
Jacobs also said that library officials would actively seek out any opportunities for grants to fund construction of a new library addition, as well as getting assistance from the Northeast Kansas Library System in choosing an architect to design an addition. In the meantime, there’s still the matter of determining what to do with an expansion to the building.
“Do we rearrange what’s in here now and make this more meeting space?” Jacobs asked. “There are a lot of decisions that need to be made, so that’s why we want the public’s input on it.”