City Council Minutes 2002 06 04 - Laserfiche WebLink

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Louisville City Council Meeting June 4, 2002 Page 4 Humphries and Consultant Dick Waters for the purpose of assessing the needs of the community. The team met several times and conducted three public meetings and participated in two City Council study sessions. She stated that the focus was on the downtown area, because of the importance to the community, however the potential to locate in the downtown area is limited because of the lack of adequate space for both the building and parking. The team narrowed the alternative down to two sites. The two preferred sites are the City owned parking lot north of the library on the comer of Spruce and Front Streets and the privately owned property at the comer of Pine and Front Streets (Post Office site). She stated that the recommendation was considered from the perspective of the interest of library users as well as Louisville residents. She reported that the unanimous recommendation of the Team is that the City should choose the Post Office site for the relocation of the library. Dennis Humphries, Humphries Poli Architects, stated that the recommendations presented to Council will provide an optimal efficient library for the next 20 years for the Louisville citizens. Humphries summarized the recommendation: · Louisville requires a library of 23,000 asfto meet the needs of the community to the year 2020. · The library should remain downtown as an important civic anchor. · The existing building was not intended for expansion and has numerous limitations. · In keeping with the scale of downtown, a two-story building of 31,000 gsf is recommended. · 59 parking spaces are required using the City's parking formula of 2.5 cars/1000/asf · Four specific sites in the downtown were evaluated. The existing Post Office site at Pine and Front Street affords the most opportunities to provide an efficient library for the community. · The potential net cost of the Library project is $6.6M. Humphries reviewed that the strengths of the Louisville Library are its staff, usage, collections, children's programming and book stack arrangement. He reported that the library's deficiencies are the shortage of space for collections, inadequate number of computer workstations for public, no "children's only" story time/program space, no table seating for adults, unsafe library material return and the noise level. Humphries reviewed the four sites for the relocation of the library and explained that each site was analyzed and given an objection score. Since both sites scored on the same level, other factors were investigated. Through the established criteria the possible site were narrowed to two. He stated that the Team recommends the Post Office site and explained that it will provide a gateway to the downtown area and an anchor that will attract thousands to the site and allow them to frequent other businesses in the downtown area. 4