Library to reveal proposed site and cost

Public will have six weeks to discuss report

The Ottawa Public Library will reveal on Thursday where a new central facility should be built and how the city could pay for it.

OPL staff have been busy managing a complicated process that considers two possibilities for a new facility: a standalone municipal library or a partnership with Library and Archives Canada to create a super library.

The public on Thursday will also get an idea of how big the proposed facility would be and what kind of private partnership could be required to fund and build it.

No one has talked yet about how much taxpayer money, or land, would be required for such a project.

Before establishing a confidential short list, the OPL reviewed 12 sites located as far west as Bayview Transit Station and as far east as Rideau and Cumberland streets.

Five potential sites are between Bronson Avenue and Bank Street, and one is near the Rideau Centre.

Another four potential properties are near Pimisi Transit Station on LeBreton Flats. The city owns one of the sites: 557 Wellington St., just west of Bronson Avenue.

The OPL will publish the report with the recommendations after a briefing at city hall.

Coun. Tim Tierney, chair of the library board, said the report will also be available at library branches on Friday.

“We are pleased to provide the public with more than six weeks to go through the detailed information and provide us with feedback before the board discusses the report on Jan. 31,” Tierney said.

From there, it would up to council to decide the project’s fate.

“We followed a very good process, to date,” Mayor Jim Watson said in a recent interview with the Citizen.

Watson, who won re-election in 2014 after backing the idea of a public-private partnership-built library with direct transit access, acknowledged the “division” over where the library should be located. He said his goal has been to avoid getting “bogged down with a whole bunch of infighting” among groups.

“It’s going to be a big project. It’s going to cost a lot of money,” Watson said. “But as we’ve seen in cities like Vancouver and Halifax, these help to change the cityscape of a community. The library is the largest membership club, by far, of any organization in the entire city. My commitment was that we would get shovels in the ground by the end of 2018.”