The Library Board met 10/18/2022. One of the information items they received was an update on the Library Project.
Library Director Colleen Rortvedt called attention to the Frequently Asked Questions on the library’s website and said that they were keeping that updated and trying to redirect people with questions to that.
Regarding the project itself, they had had some good meetings with SOM, Boldt, and the city’s facilities team and everybody was working hard to modify the library project and reduce the scope in order to decrease costs. They had gotten into nitty-gritty ways of saving money and had found that they would be able to find some pretty substantial savings just by doing some things a little bit differently in terms of things like concrete and other not particularly visible aspects. Though they would be making visible changes also.
A board member asked if they would be updating their design renderings and Director Rortvedt confirmed they would. She added that it had been really heartening to hear how important this project was to the people working on it and they were still trying to make it as spectacular of a building as they could.
A board member noted that the Frequently Asked Questions currently said the building was expected to be around 110,000 square feet. Was that expected to shrink?
Director Rortvedt expected it would shrink a bit. All of the spaces in the library needed to have multiple uses and serve multiple purposes so she thought there might be some other ways to create additional uses and flexibility in those spaces allowing them to reduce square footage.
She noted that every piece of square footage was not equal. Excavation was very expensive, so it was not simply a matter of shrinking it down a certain amount from the originally planned 110,000 square feet but figuring out which square feet could provide the most savings by their removal without sacrificing the functionality that they needed.
A board member asked when the dates for the start of construction and opening day would be updated from “to be determined” to actual dates.
Director Rortvedt responded that they had not provided dates for those items even before the project became delayed because they had not wanted to get ahead of the Common Council’s approval of the bids. She didn’t think it would serve them well to put those dates out there and then have to reschedule them.
The board member wondered if they might be able to at least post an idea of when those dates might end up being, because if they were left as “to be determined”, the public was going to keep asking about them.
Director Rortvedt agreed, and said, “As soon as we can, we’ll update those dates.” However, merely transcribing her comment does not in even an inadequate and imperfect way convey the amount of feeling contained in her tone which was, I felt, a combination of weariness and amused resignation at the bogged down state of library project combined with perhaps a tinge of hope that this too would pass and in the future at some unknown date and time the project would not only move forward but eventually reach a state of completion.
View full meeting details here: https://cityofappleton.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=920202&GUID=D6FF7013-98F0-46E8-A444-6B7F9072D9F8
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