The Haines Borough Public Library board is moving forward with plans to expand the library by adding a reading room on the south end of the building and an employee work station area on the north end.
Members of the board recently presented their preliminary plans for the 1,000-square-foot addition to the assembly and planning commission. The addition to the existing 8,400-square-foot building would amount to about a 12 percent increase in space.
Board member James Alborough said the north end expansion would provide work space for employees, who now need to cram into a hallway that is also used for storage and book repair.
“The working conditions for the staff amount to pretty much a glorified hallway. A really over-packed, over-stuffed hallway,” Alborough said.
The north end addition would add five employee work stations, storage space, and a room to house the library’s server and systems engineer Erik Stevens.
“The reason we’ve chosen that as our preferred alternative is that it doesn’t mess with the roofline; it extends the roofline out,” Alborough said. “It’s probably the most efficient way to do it. The only kind of wrinkle in the whole works is it does kind of eat up a little bit of the parking lot there.”
The addition would bump out into half of three parking spaces. Planning commissioner Lee Heinmiller suggested the half-spaces might be designated for bicycle and motorcycle parking.
Alborough said he has been in discussions with public facilities director Carlos Jimenez about possibly paving a connection between the administration and library parking lots.
The south end expansion would add a reading area with tall windows looking out at the totem pole behind the building. It would also have a partition, much like the existing reading room, so the space could be used for loud or messy purposes, board member Heather Lende said.
“That room would also be kind of a multi-purpose room, because a lot of what is happening in the library now isn’t always things you want in a quiet carpeted area,” Lende said. “It would be a room where you could have art projects and demonstrate building things or making things.”
The board commissioned the conceptual drawings from MRV Architects.
A price tag for the project has not been identified.
The library received $55,000 in Capital Improvement Projects funding from the borough last year for design of the expansion. The library intends to seek construction funding through outside sources like grants.
“The board is going to obviously be embarking on a fundraising campaign to get crowd-funding for some of it. We also have several large donors who have expressed interest in putting money toward the reading room side of it,” Alborough said.