Friday, September 17, 2010

#3 - Libraries, Levies, and Lessons on Citizenship. . . Post Script

I forgot to mention in the last post that the proposed new library building for the central county will be 17,500 square feet which is the same size as the public area/branch work area of the largest library in the system (this does not include square footage for the service center or administration office housed in the same building). This is 3.5 times the size of the existing library building in the central county.

The estimated cost for this new library listed in the handout titled "How the Library Proposes to Spend the Levy Increase" is $7.95 million from the library levy and $1 million from private fund raising. This means the price per square foot is about $500+. This seemed unusually high so I did some checking and found library projects ranging from $200 to $350 per square foot. An 2010 article on new LEED certified (Green) buildings in New York City put costs around $425 per square foot. The Pacific Northwest isn't New York City. Is someone's math off here or will the walls and floors be marble or granite?

The inconsistency of the information regarding the levy is a bottomless pit. I need to stop before I fall in.

PS - I made a mistake in my last post about the reserves - there is in fact a line item of $1 million. Somewhere else there was different information, but at this point I couldn't tell you where. I removed my statement from the post, sorry for the error!

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