Auburn Library awaits move, but when is anyone’s guess

Sometime in March or April, King County Library System officials have said, the Auburn Library will close for a year of renovations and then reopen in a temporary home it is leasing in the old United Rentals property next door.

By Robert Whale • March 2, 2011 7:54 pm
The popular Auburn Public Library will be on the move to make way for renovation. But not specific timetable has been firmed up
The popular Auburn Public Library will be on the move to make way for renovation. But not specific timetable has been firmed up

Sometime in March or April, King County Library System officials have said, the Auburn Library will close for a year of renovations and then reopen in a temporary home it is leasing in the old United Rentals property next door.

Everybody with a stake in the renovation of the popular library on Auburn Way South is itching to know when that day will be, but nobody at KCLS, nobody at the Auburn Library and nobody at the City can say.

“We don’t know,” said an Auburn Library employee.

“Ask the City of Auburn,” said Dale Brickman, construction coordinator for KCLS.

He said the City has been dragging its feet on the landscaping and parking permits. “When you find out, let me know.”

“No, no firm dates yet, sometimes it’s not easy to get firm dates,” said Auburn Mayor Pete Lewis.

Yet the project is moving forward.

“We’ve been negotiating on the landscaping plan, and they didn’t feel that they should have to do the same landscaping in the parking area as everybody else,” Lewis said.

The plan should be coming to the City Council for approval in the next couple weeks.

KCLS will not close the library until it is able to open next door, and it can’t do that before all the permits and plans are approved.

The City originally pressed for a 20,000-square-foot Library in the early 1990s, but funding and other constraints only allowed KCLS to build to 15,000 square feet, and that’s what the library opened with in 1998. King County residents supported a $172 million capital bond in September 2004 to pay for the Auburn Library project among other library expansions and renovations. The expansion will add the originally-intended 5,000 square feet, most noticeably in the form of a glass-paneled addition that will expand into a portion of the parking space on the current east side of the building.

Among the other features will be:

• An expanded children’s area.

• A new meeting room in the northeast corner of the addition, serving as a quiet space when it is not a meeting room. When there is not a gathering in the current meeting room, it will be closed, locked and unavailable. The new meeting room will feature sliding glass doors to make it a more interactive, multi-use space.

• The relocation of bathrooms to the west side of the building and an expanded entrance way and media area in the space the restrooms now occupy.

• A quiet study area that will significantly increase the amount of seating space.

• An automated material handling system that will let patrons check in their books and get a receipt for them.

• Additional spaces for laptops and additional laptops for check out. The library will keep the same amount of fixed computers.

Rather than move its book collection over on masse, KCLS plans to bring a new but duplicate set of books and then shut down the current library.