Should Winter Park get a new library?

Should Winter Park get a new library?

Come Election Day, Winter Park voters will face one of their most important financial decisions in years. Will they vote to pay $30 million to build a futuristic new Winter Park Public Library in partnership with the Rachel D. Murrah Civic Center, or will they vote to keep things as they are?

That second option is by no means the closing of the issue with regards to the nearly 40-year-old Library building at 460 E. New England Ave. The towering monolithic cube, built of thick walls of heavy brick and stone, has seen its share of renovation over the years, with a $1.5 million project to add a third floor and renovate the rest of the building in 1994. If it stays in its current location, it undoubtedly will need another massive renovation.

Now, as it stands, the dream of Mrs. Murrah, who presented the plans for the current library in 1975, has become walled in to history, constrained by hefty construction that makes updating the Library into a technologically sophisticated Internet era difficult, or at least unsightly.

Meanwhile the Library has tried to push toward becoming a more modern, techno-driven resource center anyway. The Library has a “makerspace,” filled with video production gear, a 3D printer and audio studio mixing equipment in a dimly lit room behind a chained padlock on the second floor. A computer room on that same floor entices teenagers near the young readers’ section, but with only enough room for a handful of users at once. With goals of making the Library friendlier for people looking for a place to start businesses, using the Library’s growing array of gadgets, the building itself has become a prison of its own construction.

The current building, opened in 1977, resembles more of a fortress than a modern Library, with walls built too robustly to easily drill through, forcing wiring updates to snake along the surfaces of walls. Visitors must choose between ascending an unusually steep staircase that scares some older patrons or using an elevator so small that emergency responders can’t fit a medical stretcher in it. In an era four-decades more technically advanced than the 1970s, the building’s electrical system is also seriously overtaxed. On the third floor, a coffee maker, lights and computers can’t run at the same time; they’ll trip the breakers.

Those are serious issues for a library that’s trying to adapt to a rapidly changing world of information and technology.

The question for those who go wide-eyed at the thought of a city of less than 30,000 people footing a $30 million bill isn’t whether the Library needs updating; it’s whether it needs a new building to do it.

That’s typically up to the experts to decide, at least regarding an issue that would cost taxpayers less money. But the new Library project is an ambitious one, with a concept brought forward that would see the Library and Civic Center combined in a state-of-the-art facility that would combine the Library and the city’s resources in a long-term partnership. It’s big enough that it requires a citizen referendum to vote to pay for it.

That brings up a good point already raised by a group battling to stop the Library project: will the city have to keep paying even more money for the project down the road?

Mary Gail Coffee, director of community relations for the Library, said that over a 20-year span the total cost will be more like $43 million for the new building plus bond interest. There will also be an expected 7 percent increase in operating costs, though improvements in efficiency are expected to offset some other potential costs.

Compare that to roughly $12-13 million it would cost to renovate the building as it stands today, and the question becomes obvious: is a new Library worth all that extra money?

That depends upon what the library means to you. If you see it merely as a book depository that also rents out movies, then any extra money to renovate, let alone build an entirely new building, might seem extreme. But given the massive recent evolution in how we consume information and how we use libraries well beyond their basic intent, it’s easy to see how starting fresh with a more adaptable platform will help the Library keep pace with the future as it comes, rather than catching back up to it every few decades with sledgehammers and Band-Aids.

That’s the goal of a new Library: to not only bring it up to a modern standard, but to make it more adaptable for the future, so that this doesn’t need to be revisited again, or at least as soon. And in combining with the Rachel D. Murrah Civic Center, the project updates two aging buildings at once, combining them into an efficiently packaged multi-use center that only barely exceeds the footprint of the current Civic Center, on the northern edge of Martin Luther King Jr. Park. This is no Carlisle project; it’s an inviting resource and event center that can be used by anybody, in a space already occupied by an existing, aging structure.

The argument for keeping the Library where it stands in a more centralized location in the city is a good one to be made, considering how far west the Civic Center is compared to the city’s geographic center. Considering the inevitability of a serious and costly update to the library, the location argument is also the strongest one against moving it.

But considering how much westward renovation of the city’s downtown core that we’ve seen since the Library first opened its doors, that distance has closed dramatically between where people congregate and where the new Library would stand. No longer is the walkable area of Winter Park sharply cut off west of Park Avenue as it had been in the past. In the future, the thriving central core of Winter Park will only grow closer to the Library. It’s arguable that it’s already there.

That leaves the question of what happens to the building and property if the Library vacates it. Rumors have flown that Rollins College would be the first bidder to try to buy it up and expand its geographically constrained campus across the street. Considering how Rollins’ partnership with the city has played out advantageously for both parties for more than 100 years, that’s hardly something to fear, unless the building becomes a three-story dormitory, which could rightfully worry nearby neighbors. That’s also something the city could legislatively prevent.

Suffice it to say, there are clear compromises in building an entirely new Library in a new location, but the advantages of doing so are too big to overlook. Further foot dragging after 40 years of technological innovation will only hold the Library back further into the past with each passing day. Building a new Library now will help ease adaptability to keep it up to date, rather than playing catch-up every few decades. The Winter Park-Maitland Observer endorses voting yes on the Winter Park Public Library and Civic Center project bond this election.