As City Council adopts budget.... Some final WC Library numbers: $1.6 million under budget …

At the City Council meeting, Assistant Walnut Creek City Manager Lorie Tinfow reported some final budget numbers on the library as it prepares for its July 17 opening. They include:

--The library will come it at a total cost of $39.9 million

--The original budget, set in January 2007, was $46 million

--Last year, the council reduced the budget to $41.5 million

--The Walnut Creek Library Foundation has raised more than $5 million towards the project.

--The two libraries will be open a total of 56 hours a week.

Oh, and the City Council adopted its 2010-12 budget 4-1, with council member Gary Skrel casting the no vote.

It's coming...

Whether you like it or not. As San Francisco Mayor Gavin would say.

Yes, there are some people who are not happy, especially now with big concerns about cuts the city is going to have to make to balance its 2010-12 budget.

And then there are others who are getting pumped up for the library's July 17 opening day and what could be the biggest party this town has seen in a while.

Here are photos of the library, as it nears completion, on April 22. Thanks to the reader who shared these with us.

Above: The south end of the library. The door opens into the Marketplace and coffee bar.










Left: The lights hanging between the young adult on the left and the and reference areas on the right.

Below top: The sculpture, "Journey of a Bottle," by Marta Thomas and hung above the north lobby.

Bottom: One of six panels created by Amy Blackstone for the fence in the children's garden.

Save the Date! For the “Damn library’s” grand opening in July and a really cool art show that will accompany it

Okay, library supporters, before you take offense at my continued use of the “damn library” reference, consider that perhaps some readers and I have adopted it as a term of endearment.


Anyway, the library will celebrate its grand opening July 17. I’ll keep you posted as I get more details on what this extravaganza entails. Sorry to library naysayers, but I like how the library is looking. I drive along Civic Drive towards Walnut Creek Intermediate every morning. I catch a glimpse of it through the branches of the trees outside City Hall and Civic Park, and I think its design fits in nicely with the setting.

Meanwhile, I’ve received word that the Bedford Gallery is putting together an exhibition whose theme ties in to the library’s opening. Unbound: A National Exhibition of Book Art (July 1-August 22) celebrates the book as an art form. The show will feature artists who make one-of-a-kind art books as well as artists who disassemble pages, covers, and spines to create three-dimensional works.

I became somewhat familiar with this art form while getting a master’s degree at Mills College in Oakland in the late 1990s. Mills, which is well known for its fine arts programs, also offers a pioneering program in book art, where students learn about the conceptual, theoretical, historical, and craft foundations of contemporary artists' bookmaking. (This photo shows a work by Julie Chen, a professor of book arts at Mills College, who is scheduled to participate in the show.)

One wonders with the introduction of the Kindle, IPads, and the whole concept of e-books, whether real books (you know with paper and bindings) will become a thing of the past--or if the whole art of bookmaking will transform into something digital.

Writing from the Lafayette library Sunday... If Walnut Creek's new library is anything like this place ...

I might have a new hangout

As I write this, it is Sunday afternoon, and I decided to work at the new Lafayette library—or, officially, the Lafayette Library and Learning Center.

Perhaps it will become my office away from my home office—or my work office. That is, until Walnut Creek opens its library in mid-July. (Yes, that "damn library.")

In the meantime, here at Lafayette's library, each table has someone like me sitting at it, typing away at laptop. The various sitting areas, with sofas and chairs, are occupied with people—kids, teens, soccer moms or dads, grandparents—reading magazines or books they are going to check out. Each of the smaller conference rooms contains one person or small groups of people working together. People occupy most of the 12 computers in the technology center, and several teens are sitting and working in the homework room.

Oh, and in the separate wing, which contains the children’s area, a group of kids are gathered around a computer. Others are poking through the book shelves, and a mom is sitting with her toddler, reading a story aloud.

It also looks like people are browsing the aisles, looking to check out—No way in our era of everything digital and everyone suffering from some form of attention deficit disorder--books!

This is my second visit to Lafayette’s new three-level 30,000-square-foot library, and it’s a lovely building. A quiet, inviting place to hang out, and read, do work, or, as I am now, blog (free wi-fi!)

It has soaring ceilings with exposed, rough-wood beams, tall glass windows, dark-wood tables and shelves, and outdoor decks and a garden. With paintings on the walls and cool, modernist sculptures filling some spaces, it’s like a home I wouldn’t mind living in.

I last visited last Saturday. I arrived just before 1 p.m., when the doors open on weekends, and people were standing outside, waiting to get in.

This is a busy place on weekends. It’s like a coffee house, except I don’t have to buy a latte and pastry in order to feel like I have the right to stick around. 

As I’ve said in the past, I didn’t involve myself one way or the other in expressing a viewpoint on Walnut Creek's effort to build its own new downtown library.

Maybe--I still think--Walnut Creek saw what its neighbors to the west were up to in Lafayette. If Lafayette could have a stylish new downtown library, Walnut Creek’s civic and community leaders thought, so should Walnut Creek! Maybe there was some civic ego involved.

Also, as I’ve said in the past, I was fond of the old Walnut Creek downtown library.

But sitting now in Lafayette’s new pride and joy, I can definitely see the advantage of a new, more spacious, comfortable, and user-friendly building. I can't say I ever wanted to hang out too long in Walnut Creek's dear old library.

Some say that libraries are a thing of the past—what with the advent of the Internet.

Well, this place I’m sitting in right now feels like a thing of the present and even the future.

As for people not going to libraries as much as in the past to obtain books, DVDs, or other materials? that’s not the case. Walnut Creek Librarian Cindy Britain writes (in an e-mail shared with me by Walnut Creek Library Foundation Executive Director Kristen Anderson):

--In fiscal year 2007-08, the number of number of items checked out from Contra Costa County libraries was 6,132,207, a 13 percent increase over the 5,428,511 items circulated the year before.

--The greatest area of circulation growth is in fiction books, with a huge growth in the children's and young adult areas.

The New York Times reports that, especially during these economic hard times, libaries across the country are seeing double-digit increases in patronage, often from 10 percent to 30 percent, over previous years.

Brittain adds in her e-mail: “Providing pleasure reading is where we have excelled. Our circulation growth is quite impressively due to people doing more book reading! The figures show that choices to purchase large quantities of new releases has made us more relevant in people's lives. Biographies show great growth as well. Again, pleasure reading. Picture books and Easy Readers are the most popular of our text materials. More children's books are checked out than Young Adult and adult books combined.”

Oh, and regarding complaints about the garage being built under Walnut Creek's library, and the added cost involved? Lafayette's has a below-ground garage, and I have to say it makes a visit here extremely convenient. In fact, trying to find street parking around this building, even on a Sunday when businesses are closed, would have been impossible.

"Damn library" will open probably under budget but with fewer hours

The "damn library" in this headline is a tribute to a good-humoured reader who leaves--in jest, I imagine--this two-word comment on many articles related to Walnut Creek civic spats and controversies.

That's right, this reader seems to be saying--or is poking fun as those who do adhere to this view--that if something is messed up in town, it just has to be the fault of the "damn library." That "damn library" is sucking away money, time, energy from other, perhaps more worthy causes.

The Contra Costa Times's Elisabeth Nardi reports today that the 42,000-square-foot library, long a source of controversy, will open in late spring or early summer. Some good news? The library, and its 123-space underground parking garage, appear to be coming in under the $41.5 million budget, but just how much no one is saying. Not yet.

The bad news? Well, just as the library opens, Measure Q, a $22-per parcel tax passed in 2002, will run out. Measure Q helped Walnut Creek libraries beef up the number of hours that their staff, employees with the Contra Costa County Library system, worked. Instead of the county only being able to staff the library 35 hours a week, Measure Q helped the county to pay workers to keep the Walnut Creek libraries to be open 56 hours.

The city, right now, seems reluctant to go back to Walnut Creek voters and ask them to extend the parcel tax. "It's not the time right now to ask the taxpayers and residents for more funding," Lorie Tinfow, assistant city manager told the Times.

Sigh.

I know that the library has long been a red-hot issue, long before the Neiman Marcus bomb dropped into town. I have friends who emphatically support the new library. I have friends who believe construction of the library has been a huge waste of resources.

I confess I was not paying much mind to the proposed new library when the idea first hit the fan: working, raising a small child.

I always had a sentimental attachment to the old library, because, as a teen-ager, I worked there after school and in the summers. What a great job. I helped check out books and would push those carts around into the stacks to shelve books. I confess I tended to disappear in those stacks if a book on the cart happened to catch my fancy.

Best part-time job for a teen-ager and college student ever!

I do believe civic ego drove some Walnut Creek city and community leaders to believe that they needed a grand new monument in town. Hey, Danville got it's swanky new library. So did other towns up and down the I-680 corridor, from Livermore to Dublin to San Ramon. I like Orinda's library plaza and fountain and the little cafe below.

And then....

Lafayette got its new, somewhat pretentiously titled, "Lafayette Library and Learning Center." Well, I can imagine some Walnut Creek city and community leaders could not abide being shown up by, hmph, Lafayette!

So, a series of political battles and elections later, we are going to soon have a new downtown library. I suppose some of us could continue to grumble about the waste, the folly, the ego.

Or, we could just accept that it's going to open soon, and maybe it will be kind of cool and worth all the fuss in the long term. Hey, it's going to have a cafe!

Maybe, just maybe, it will exceed any of our low expections. How about that? I know when I pass along North Broadway and see that street-facing facade take shape, I think, hey, the library might turn out looking pretty good! Design-wise, it might just turn out to be a credit to our--uh--notable Walnut Creek skyline.