Library looks for concepts from architectural firms
The future of the Flathead County Library's main branch gets a face put to it on Aug. 25.
That's when Architects Northwest, CTA Architects Engineers and Fullerton Architects will unveil their conceptual drawings of what a new Kalispell library just might look like.
From 9 a.m. to noon that Tuesday, the public will get its first look at the drawings when architects show their work at a special Library Board meeting.
Flathead County Library trustees announced this week that they commissioned the three firms with sketching out 52,000-square-foot buildings and 100 parking spaces on three different sites in Kalispell.
They called it the Main Library Conceptualization Project.
The architects have a month to come up with suggestions for the best way to use each of their assigned sites:
n Architects Northwest will design for the 1.5-acre Flathead Industries main campus off Fifth Avenue West.
n CTA Architects will work out a plan for the former Manion car dealership that sat on a little over 2 acres on East Center Street at the north end of Second Avenue East.
n Fullerton Architects will craft a new idea for the current downtown library on First Avenue East, which takes up about half of a city block now.
The library still has 12 years on its lease with Kalispell School District 5 there. It probably would expand by the Library Board buying neighboring property.
In appreciation for their work, each firm will receive a $1,000 honorarium.
They're among the five firms submitting letters of interest for the project. Grover and Co. in Whitefish - which is working on the redesign of Glacier Discovery Center in Columbia Falls, the future site of the Columbia Falls branch library - and Jackola Engineering and Architecture of Kalispell also were interested.
"Because this was a concept project, this was just to get the creativity and interesting concepts," Flathead County Library System Director Kim Crowley said. "So it wasn't like we were choosing an architect or not choosing an architect. We just looked at their proposals. Any of the five would have done well."
As trustee Connie Leistiko said in a press release, the conceptualization project is part of the information-gathering process and will help them visualize and evaluate the sites that the facilities committee ranked at the top of a list of possible properties.
Crowley called those three the "A list."
"We've been working on this on and off for six years," Crowley said. It started with a space-needs assessment in 2003 that determined that a 55,000-square-foot building would get the Kalispell library through 2020.
"In the last year and a half we had a citizen committee on library facilities looking at possible sites for a new main library," she said. "We came up with a list of about eight sites that made it to the end."
The library facilities committee downsized the consultant's recommendation to 52,000 for this conceptualization project.
"This will help the library board determine what a building might cost," she said. "We'll look more closely at these sites, but it doesn't mean another site may not come up. We'll do a public outreach after this, and possibly do a bond tolerance survey."
Working in a library system that Crowley said barely has enough money to operate, she said there are no savings to cover costs yet. But the Mary Lagoni Trust Fund has about $500,000 designated for a main library, she said.
They've also written an $1 million appropriations request to the Montana Congressional delegation to buy the land for a future library, and will write grant requests and conduct private fundraising drives through the Flathead County Library Foundation.
Crowley said she and fellow library advocates also will be at the July 28 meeting of the Flathead County commissioners to ask for $350,000 of the county's pool of money collected through payments in lieu of taxes.
Reporter Nancy Kimball can be reached at 758-4483 or by e-mail at nkimball@dailyinterlake.com