Library project gets reprieve

Date: 1/11/2012

Jan. 11, 2012

By Debbie Gardner

Assistant Editor

WEST SPRINGFIELD — The proposed construction of a new public library is still a viable project, at least for the next six months.

Sharon Scott, chairman of the Board of Trustees for the West Springfield Public Library, confirmed for Reminder Publications that the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners (MBLC) unanimously approved its request for an extension of its project application during a meeting on Jan. 5.

Without the extension, the Town Council would have had to vote on the bonding issue by Jan. 30. Scott said the board didn’t think it was “going to get an affirmative vote” in that short time frame with so many changes in town government.

The library now has until June 30 to secure bond authorization from the Town Council for West Springfield’s portion of the construction costs for the proposed $13.4 million project. The library received a $6.2 million construction grant from the MBLC in July 2011. It needs the town’s approval to bond for $7.1 million to cover the remaining construction costs.

At its first meeting of the year, the newly sworn-in members of the Town Council voted 8-0 to continue deliberation on the library bond authorization until its Jan. 17 meeting. At Large Councilor Kathleen Bourque, who was re-elected to the post of council president, recused herself from the vote because family members own property near the proposed site of the new library at Mittineague School.

State Sen. James Welch, who attended the Jan. 3 council meeting, said applying for the extension would allow for the library’s plans “to be vetted out and let the new councilors [have] that much more time to decide how the town wants to proceed” on the project.

Scott agreed that the extension would allow the new mayor and two new town councilors to “get up to speed with all the information that came forward [on the project] in the past year.” It would, she said, also allow the library to tackle some “unresolved issues” with both the proposed construction site and the re-use of the original library building on Park Street.

Scott noted that, as has been discussed at several Town Council meetings, Mittineague School has not yet been decommissioned by the School Department.

“Students are still attending classes there. We need to either find an alternative site for the children or an alternative site for the library,” she noted, adding that this is “going to cause a delay” and was another major reason the library chose to request an extension.

Two other issues — calculating the cost of re-purposing the original library building and determining “whether or not the town can support a capital campaign for the library” at this time — were also determining factors, according to Scott.

She said the Board of Trustees has hired Finance Development Agency of Amherst as fund-raising consultants to determine if the town would support the necessary capital campaign to complete the library project.

“They have worked on several successful financial campaigns in Chicopee and now in Holyoke,” Scott said. “They are in the process of finishing up a feasibility study and we will probably know by our meeting on Jan. 10 what kind of capital campaign the town will be able to support.”