Council Votes to Move Oak Park Library Into a New but Smaller Home

The town’s cramped library will have a new, if not particularly fancy, home.

The Oak Park Municipal Council voted Tuesday night to forge ahead with a decades-old plan to move the community’s lone library from its home at Oak Park High School to its own building.

But because funding for the proposed library is tenuous, the council unanimously agreed to a smaller, more modest version of the facility.

Last month, the council learned that $2 million in developers’ fees set aside in the 1970s for the new library were not going to cover the cost of building a 15,000-square-foot facility.

“The consultant should be impressed with the fact that we don’t want a Taj Mahal. We don’t need a building with all sorts of grandiose add-ons,” Councilman Kent Behringer said.

In agreeing to support a small library building, the council scrapped plans to recommend a $1-million bond issue to pay for construction of a larger library.

“My feeling is that the public is going to want us to spend what we have,” Councilman Chuck Monico said. “We should go for the largest library we can buy with the money we have and it will suffice.”

Based on preliminary architectural estimates, the $2 million could pay for a library of 6,000 to 10,000 square feet.

The scramble to improve the area’s existing 4,300-square-foot library has been plagued with problems from the outset.

Oak Park was turned down in June for a $1-million federal grant that would have covered added construction costs.

But based on a preliminary plan submitted by an architect, the community is still $1.5 million short of covering construction costs for a planned 15,000-square-foot facility next to Oak Park High.

One option the board considered Tuesday was whether to downscale the proposed library to 10,000 square feet to fit the construction budget.

But operators of the existing library at Oak Park High had earlier said a minimum of 13,500 square feet was needed just for books, and an additional 1,500 square feet was requested for a meeting room.

But Noreen Armerding, president of the Friends of Oak Park Library, said the library could operate in these smaller-than-planned quarters.

“We cannot continue to go on like this. We have to discard old books when new ones come in,” she said.

To maintain the library after it is built, the board has approved the idea of allowing Airtouch Cellular, a cellular phone company, to erect a cellular antenna atop the building’s roof. It is estimated that leasing the space would generate $1,000 a month in revenue.