Overcoming most neighborhood opposition, the facility will serve the city's west side and St. Petersburg College.
By JON WILSON
Published May 2, 2004
ST. PETERSBURG - In its early stages, the newest public library plan threw hot sparks.
It will mean closing an intimate neighborhood branch in west St. Petersburg. Some residents got their hackles up.
But a joint-use deal with St. Petersburg College looked too good to City Council members to pass up. They approved it in late 2002.
Wednesday, officials shook shovels in a formal groundbreaking at the St. Petersburg-Gibbs Campus of the college, 6605 Fifth Ave. N.
Crews actually have been working on the site for a few weeks. The old cafeteria and the student services building have been demolished to make way for the $9.5-million, 50,000-square-foot library.
Its foundation already is taking shape.
"See the big smile on my face? I'm a happy man," said council member Richard Kriseman, who represents west St. Petersburg.
Kriseman said it took a lot of neighborhood meetings to win support for the new library, which will be used by both college students and the general public. Officials took a trip to Broward County in South Florida to look at a similar joint-use project.
What they saw was impressive, Kriseman said, and probably helped sway the council's decision. "There's still going to be those who may not like the idea. I think overall we really have citywide support," Kriseman said.
The library is on schedule to open in spring 2005, officials say.
Except for a few technical courses whose students have access to special electronic databases, books and other research materials will be available to all.
There won't be one staff for the public and another for the student body.
"It doesn't matter whether you're a student or a member of the community. When you walk up to somebody and ask for assistance, they're going to help you," said Susan Anderson, the library's director.
Among the resources will be more than 90 computers and 120,000 books. An unusual element is a collection of about 4,000 books in Russian, both fiction and nonfiction. SPC got them when a Russian bookseller in Maryland ran into business difficulty.
They are expected to be useful to scholars and a growing Eastern European population, some of whom read in Russian, Anderson said.
Another highlight will be an 8,000-square-foot children's room, which youngsters have helped design. A separate teen room also is in the works.
Conference rooms, a 100-seat community room and a coffee shop are planned. About 70 new public parking spaces will be allotted.
A link from the Pinellas Trail a few blocks away is another feature.
St. Petersburg city government paid $2-million of the library construction cost out of the county's penny sales tax fund, said capital improvements director John Green. SPC's share came from state money.
The city also will pay $300,000 yearly for operating expenses that include salaries and acquisitions, said Deputy Mayor Mike Dove.
Decisions on acquisitions and other matters will be made by a "joint effort of staff people talking to each other," Dove said.
In such a partnership, "you couldn't put enough details in a document to specify every working situation. (You) just make sure you have the people with the right attitude," he said.
For years, the city has had a joint-use agreement at Azalea Middle School, operating a city library in conjunction with the school facility. The city part of the library will close when the new library opens. Its staff will be able to become part of the 20- to 25-member staff at the new library, Anderson said.
It was the Azalea closure that generated opposition to the city's joint-use plan with SPC. Residents in some western neighborhoods liked the convenience and the coziness of the library. They didn't want to lose it.
Steve Plice, a longtime Jungle Terrace resident and former president of the neighborhood association, was among the opponents.
"We thought it was a bad idea. We still think it's a bad idea. It's one we lost," he said last week.
A few years ago, controversy shadowed another SPC project involving a joint-use library with Seminole. It opened last year, and is widely considered a successful project. Several speakers referred to it during last week's ceremony on the St. Petersburg-Gibbs campus.
The two-story library will face Eagle Lake. None of the parkland around the lake will be touched, said Susan Reiter, SPC's director of facilities planning and institutional services.
