Hoping to lower the estimated cost of a new library, Buellton officials recently considered cutting one aspect of the project that some consider essential to its success.
During its Feb. 9 meeting, members of the Buellton City Council discussed a budget and design proposal to retrofit a city-owned property—the historic Willemsen House on Dairyland Road—into a library with a large meeting room for community members to meet. The retrofit alone is estimated to cost $1.4 million, according to staff, while the meeting room partition, or divider, will probably cost $25,000.
“We should do the divider because that meeting room will be key, I think, to making this a great building,” Judith Dale, president of Friends of the Buellton Library and former mayor of Buellton, said during public comment.
“Why do you think that meeting room is key?” newly elected Councilmember Hudson Hornick asked Dale.
Dale said the meeting room would attract clubs and groups outside the city to meet in Buellton.
“There’s lots of organizations and communities—not only in our city, but countywide—that need a place to meet, and Buellton is so central,” Dale said. “We’ve got two highways that cross here. We’re central in the county.”
Dale used an example from her own experience attending various meetings she’s been a part of to make a point that a new meeting venue in Buellton could increase spending at businesses in town.
“What happens when we have these meetings is, with about 25 to 30 people, we all go to lunch together; we all shop; we all do things,” Dale said. “Let’s make Buellton the place to meet.”
Rather than decide on approving the proposed budget and design for the library development, Mayor David King motioned that staff return at a later date with information on another route to potentially decrease the project’s $1.4 million price tag.
“I went through dozens of pages of plans, and the retrofitting is what’s costing us all the money,” King said. “I don’t know if anybody else would want to entertain the idea to maybe kick this down the road, and at least get a preliminary bid of how much it would cost to put a new building there—it could be designed exactly like a library. Instead … we’re trying to hodgepodge a library into a house that was not designed for a library.”
King’s colleagues on the City Council agreed to table the item and directed staff to research how much it would cost to build a new library at the Dairyland Road site, to compare with the proposed retrofit budget.
This article appears in Feb 16-23, 2023.
