Category: Library

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Crozet Library Going to Bid

It’s about time. Thank you everyone for all of your hard work.

From our Supervisor, Ann Mallek:

As I get ready for dinner, please help to share my thanks with all in the Crozet and Western Albemarle community who have supported construction of the Crozet library since 1988. This afternoon the Board of Supervisors did approve sending the project to bid. The Board will approve final wording a week from today, at our 3 pm financial planning discussion in room 241.   

A final vote is still needed to send the project to construction, of course, as every project requires final approval once the bids are received and evaluated. Decisions on the fiscal year 2013 budget will be made in March/April, 2012.

Today’s first step is essential to make the process real in the minds of our bidders and our donors. Today’s success would never have happened without you. I may be the point of the spear, but you are the muscle-the sustained, informed, persistent outreach from many members of the community was and still is essential. You wrote letters, made phone calls, met with supervisors individually, sent emails, and stormed the BOS meetings with witty and intelligent information about the history of the project. No supervisor could ever ask for more from her constituents.   

The bid documents will be finalized in about a month. The plans are now at about 98% completion. Board member Duane Snow suggested adding to the bid process that builders are invited to make suggestions of cost savings for the project. This will continue the value engineering on the plans begun this fall.

The CIP or Capital Improvement Program committee has the library as its number 1 project. Their report will come to the board and the public during the next week.

The funds for the library construction are based upon an equalized tax rate. Retaining a fourth tax cut in a row would leave the local government facing severe service cutbacks and remove any capital projects from the budget, even emergency projects. 0.5 cents of the equalized rate revenue is to be used for capital projects ONLY, and other efficiencies and reductions in local government operations will be used to meet increased expenses for retirement system payments and other mandated obligations.

There is more work to do, more baby steps to accomplish, but we are on a better path today. Pleased stay focused on this project and continue to share your support with the [email protected].

Thank you again. See you at the Soiree.

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Crozet’s Library Takes another Hit

Ted Strong at the Daily Progress reports:

Limits on children’s and other programs at the Crozet Library is the net result of a recent fire marshal’s inspection, the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library board heard Monday.
After the marshal found a number of safety issues, county officials restricted the library’s occupancy to 50 people. During the summer, the library sees more than 10,000 patron visits each month.

The County’s collective negligence in not building the new Crozet Library is remarkable.

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Build Crozet Library meets at the Crozet Library – Mon, Nov 28th, 7-8 pm

via email from Build Crozet Library –

Please come out to meet and work on building our outreach. Let’s find out who we are reaching with our emails, website, and Facebook page and figure out who we could be reaching. Think about geographic locations, library patron groups, schools, subdivisions, community groups, etc.

Prior to the meeting I will send out a link to a Google doc and ask for your help to identify targets. [Please note:  the meeting room is used until 7 pm for ‘books and blankets’, so we will wait until the toddlers in pjs and their parents clear out before we start.]

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Show your Support for the (building of) Crozet Library

via email:

Greetings friends/patrons of the Crozet Library,

Crozet and JMRL staff and board representatives have been working with Albemarle County staff and Supervisors for some time to urge them to fulfill their promise of building the new Crozet/Western Albemarle Library.

The plans for the new library were approved by the County Architectural Review Board in April. The parking lot for the new library is currently under construction.

A small group of supporters is convinced that strong and sustained advocacy is the only way to get the new library built. We are in the process of organizing this grassroots effort as “Build Crozet Library.”

There’s a particular urgency to this effort: without seeing steps taken toward building the new building soon, JMRL will need to start reducing the collection at the current Crozet Library. The excellent staff has done everything they can to make the space work for all patrons, but the crowded conditions are not sustainable.

WED, Oct. 5, at 9:00 am:

Continue reading “Show your Support for the (building of) Crozet Library”

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Crozet Library (still) Delayed

From the Newsplex:

However, it’s coming up with the remainder of the nearly $7 million price tag that’s put construction of the library on hold. The Crozet Library Steering Committee was informed last year that the project could be postponed until 2015 if the money cannot be raised.

Of course, if you’d been paying attention last month, you would have known this. 🙂

(full post here from the CCAC meeting)

** If anyone out there is interested in live-tweeting any Crozet meetings, please let me know. I’ll happily help.

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Will Crozet’s Next Library Be … (courtesy of Seth Godin)

If the new Crozet ever gets built (PDF) …

When will the new library be built?

The schematic plan for the library was presented to the Planning Commission in February of 2009, and will be presented to the BOS in March of 2009 after presentation to the Crozet community. Once the schematic plan is approved, formal design will proceed. Based on revised Capital Improvements Plan recommendations under consideration by the BOS, construction funding will shift from July 2009 to July 2011, allowing for completion by Fall 2012.

… Will Crozet’s next Library be this?

The next library is a place, still. A place where people come together to do co-working and coordinate and invent projects worth working on together. Aided by a librarian who understands the Mesh, a librarian who can bring domain knowledge and people knowledge and access to information to bear.

The next library is a house for the librarian with the guts to invite kids in to teach them how to get better grades while doing less grunt work. And to teach them how to use a soldering iron or take apart something with no user servicable parts inside. And even to challenge them to teach classes on their passions, merely because it’s fun. This librarian takes responsibility/blame for any kid who manages to graduate from school without being a first-rate data shark.

The next library is filled with so many web terminals there’s always at least one empty. And the people who run this library don’t view the combination of access to data and connections to peers as a sidelight–it’s the entire point.

Wouldn’t you want to live and work and pay taxes in a town that had a library like that? The vibe of the best Brooklyn coffee shop combined with a passionate raconteur of information? There are one thousands things that could be done in a place like this, all built around one mission: take the world of data, combine it with the people in this community and create value.