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A library of questions

Posted on April 14, 2011 by Staff

A lot remains unanswered about the new library in downtown Carrboro. For starters, there’s still some uncertainty about where. The board of aldermen may have changed the zoning, but the location is not a done deal.

The county is now in the final phase of deciding whether the 210 Hillsborough Road site is right for its purposes. There are all the details of a land closing and other potential for hurdles still to come.

And there’s the mayor’s pledge, written into a resolution passed just after Tuesday’s zoning vote, to go over potential alternative locations with the county commissioners.

Assuming the Hillsborough Road location does get the nod – place your bets, ladies and gentlemen – there are a whole slew of questions to follow. With no site plan to review and no way of knowing except in vague terms how the county plans to handle ingress and egress, driveway and buffers, programming, hours and the like, there is a considerable unease about how a library can fit in that space and not dramatically change its surroundings. Those surroundings include a large elementary school, a church and a relatively quiet residential neighborhood.

Tuesday night’s vote came with reservations, but it answered at least one of the key questions about the library and the future relationship between Orange County and Carrboro. By approving the zoning, the town has indicated strongly that it is willing to play ball. By following that up with specific questions about the site plan as well as a call for a charrette on the library design, the board of aldermen also sent a signal that the path to a permit will need to be much more transparent and inclusive than proceedings have been thus far.

The ball now is in the county’s court, both in performing due diligence on the Hillsborough Road site and in hearing out the town’s call for a look at the alternatives. While that’s going on, a very public process should begin on what this library will become – how it will serve the 37,000 people in its region as well as how it will fit in its new neighborhood.

So far, county officials have offered a lot of boilerplate on what the new library would look like and feel like, citing the official definition of a full-service library and so on.

It’s time to move on from that and truly engage Carrboro and citizens throughout southwest Orange County about the shape and direction of a new public amenity.

A charrette is a good start and, as was noted Tuesday night, it should be a true public forum and not an information session about what the county intends to do.

A successful, collaborative effort on the library could help end a long era of wary combativeness between county and town. Such an outcome would be most welcome. This is a cooperative community in spirit, and its governments should reflect that.

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