Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Largo should consider other options for center

Largo city commissioners fretted for almost two years about how to use the shuttered former library building on East Bay Drive, hiring expensive consultants and polling citizen groups along the way to help them find an answer.

After much ado, commissioners seemed to have a workable plan last June, when they decided to renovate the building and use it to house some new arts programs and the functions now performed by the popular but aging downtown Community Center.

All that effort went for naught last week, when the City Commission, informed that renovation costs would be almost $3-million more than they expected at $5.28-million, voted to tear down the 1970s-era building and plant grass there so the site will look like an extension of Largo Central Park.

Users of the former library will remember the building's clunky electrical and climate control systems. Replacing those systems alone was going to cost $1.45-million.

The 36,000-square-foot library has been sitting empty since the new library on Central Park Drive opened in July 2005. Within a month, it will be gone, and passers-by will see open space where none has existed since the structure was completed in 1977.

City officials said they are not giving up on the dream of building a community center/arts center in the park someday, but with renovation costs so high, using the old library building wasn't practical. That amount of money could go a long way toward building a structure designed from the ground up for community center and arts functions, rather than trying to make an old library building work, as City Commissioner Andy Guyette, an engineer, pointed out.

It isn't clear when the city might have the money to build a new center. Certainly, a lengthy delay is likely, especially since the city now will be unable to immediately pursue its plan to sell the downtown community center and publicly owned land surrounding it for development.

The city might want to study whether it owns any other facilities or could lease a facility to house the Community Center's programs temporarily. That would free up the land for sale and raise some dollars for a new community center or other city needs.

Mayor Pat Gerard suggested last week that the city launch a capital campaign, as it did for the new $21-million library, to raise money for a new community center.

While the idea is a good one, the base of support for a community center is not likely to be as broad as it is for a library. The city also would need to have a detailed project plan available to show the community before passing the hat.

[Last modified November 15, 2006, 06:54:34]