For the fourth time in the past 19 years, the City of Prince George is spending time and money to consider major renovations of the Prince George Public Library, including a long-needed proper front entrance to the facility.
The previous mayor and council set aside $200,000 last October and asked staff to have a report ready for June 30.
It's now July and there's still no report in sight, probably because of the upheaval that came with a new mayor, a new city manager and significant internal restructuring.
Still, a five-person committee of city and library staff met in May to get things underway.
For the fourth time in 19 years, money will be spent on a report by consultants, and staff at the library and the city, which owns the buildings, will make recommendations. Hopefully, this is the last time.
Hopefully this time, meetings and reports turn into action, instead of another study sitting on a shelf.
About 1,000 people per day use the downtown branch of the library so the demand is there.
The two current entrances are through a hideous concrete bunker in the parkade or an exposed outdoor circle of concrete stairs facing Canada Games Plaza that is dangerous in the winter months, so the need is there.
Neither entrance was supposed to be the permanent entrance when the library was built nearly 35 years ago, so the history is there.
There are several options on the table and, fortunately, there is only one clear winner.
The Dominion Street entrance idea should be taken off the table immediately.
Externally, it would be too close to a busy
four-lane street while internally, it would require not just "a re-orientation of the Circulation Desk," as the report to council suggested, but the complete reconfiguration of the children's area.
The cafe suggestion also needs to go because it also has been studied numerous times before and the same conclusions are always reached about there being no business model for it (too little traffic spread out over too many hours).
Two options call for the main entrance to face north, towards the plaza and the Coast Hotel.
While both suggestions are better than Dominion Street, the best option would be in the northeast corner of the library, where the building meets the Civic Centre.
That link is currently a rotunda, a round two-storey indoor space with an elevator, a rock garden and a circular staircase leading up to the second floor.
Although it was used for Don Zurowski's mayoral campaign announcement last June (because the International Bioenergy Conference filled the Civic Centre at the time), it sits empty, an attractive but wasted space.
Not only would the rotunda now see regular public use, as much as half of another wasted public space - the library's concrete outdoor deck facing the Civic Centre - would be enclosed, giving the library some extra space for programming.
Hopefully, that enclosure would extend vertically to the second floor as well.
Best of all, this entrance would be immediately adjacent to the Knowledge Garden, the beautifully designed and maintained space for children's programs and quiet reading and contemplation, transformed from a once-abandoned patch of enclosed land that encouraged all sorts of unsavory activity.
Parkade users would now enter the library through the space where the rotunda and the wheelchair ramp currently are. The current parkade entrance to the library would be turned into what it should have been all along - a staff entrance with a loading bay for deliveries and a devoted service elevator.
Meanwhile, the Civic Centre could phase out its current main entry, in favor of this new entrance and the existing side doors facing Four Seasons Pool.
Another gain for the library would be a single entrance and exit for the public, instead of the two currently in place.
That would help library staff better monitor people coming in and out of the library, with a corresponding decrease in theft and mischief as a result.
Best of all, the estimated price of this entrance renovation is less than half what one of the plaza-facing options is expected to cost. The other north-facing option, as well as the Dominion Street entrance suggestion, have not been costed out.
Action is long overdue on an idea that has been talked and studied to death for nearly two decades. There is a great plan on the table that would improve not one, but two, city buildings.
Instead of consultants, it's time to hire architects and contractors.
