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02/08/2016 08:47 AMBranford’s Board of Finance (BOF) has asked the Blackstone Library Board of Trustees to align library expansion plans with town hall’s project planning channels, before the BOF will consider recommending $50,000 to help the library board pay for schematic plans for long-sought library improvements. The library improvement project is estimated to cost $4.8 million.
The request came after the Trustees sought $50,000 from the BOF on Jan. 25 to assist with the cost of testing the library’s conceptual design plans with a schematic design.
On Jan. 25, the BOF voted to table the matter for one month to allow the library board to work with the town to institute a chain of progress similar to what’s being followed for other current town buildings projects. Those projects including the recently approved $88.2 million renovation to Walsh Intermediate School and the planned expansion of the Branford Community House to create a new Senior Center/Community Center.
“In an age when we’re juggling multiple large projects, (it) may be the right time to do it, but I’d like to see a little more alignment of how that project might be bid and run from schematic design phase forward through the auspices of town hall,” said BOF chairman Joseph Mooney.
The Blackstone Library receives 85 percent of its financial support from the Town of Branford and this project is anticipated require about $3 million from the town (for planning purposes, a total of $4 million in projected library expansion costs has been on town books for several years).
The Blackstone’s Board of Trustees has already invested $76,000 towards the expansion and anticipates raising and contributing a total of some $1.5 million toward the entire project. That funding is expected to include a $500,000 state grant that’s being earmarked by Branford state legislators to be received later this year, coming from a proposed $12 million state bond act to improve libraries across Connecticut.
The Blackstone Library’s 19th-century building last underwent major infrastructure upgrades in the 1990’s. The new building improvements would include moving the Children’s Library from several disjointed rooms on the top floor of the rotunda into to the ground floor of the building, where a new Teen Library space could be incorporated and more computer resource space would be added. The former Children’s space on the top floor would then be converted to two public meeting rooms, to add options to the current Lucy Hammer Room (seats about 12) and the library’s heavily used auditorium.
In addition, the Blackstone Library’s rear entrance would become the library’s main entrance; to better align with the current handicapped accessibility and additional parking offered from that side of the building, said Library Director Karen Jensen. The design would involve adding a 2,500 square foot, glassed main entry way designed to coordinate with the style of the building, “...but it would also welcome people to the building; and show them this is the library,” Jensen said.