The city of Española is set to receive design bids for a proposed new library Sept. 1, but city officials aren’t sure where the money to pay for the plans will come from.
The plans are being developed in preparation for a $6 million bond measure scheduled to be put before the voters in March. If approved, the measure would finance a new facility for the Española Public Library. In the meantime the city is required to begin the project’s design phase, which Acting City Manager Veronica Albin said should cost no more than $20,000.
However, no definite source of funding has been identified, she said. To date, the best guess she has is that the money will come from the city’s general fund, which has already been depleted to the tune of $500,000 in cuts.
“It would have to come from the general fund, out of our professional services budget,” she said. “If we have the funds in professional services for the city manager budget or the library budget we’ll use those, but we will have to come up with a source of dedicated funds.”
Last month, every city department saw at least $1,000 in cuts and in some cases thousands of dollars more. Each department’s professional and contractual services were cut. This left the library budget and the city manager budget with just a little over $20,000 total in their professional and contractual services budgets for both departments for the entire fiscal year, according to budget documents.
If the funds are taken from those budgets, the library design is the only project either department can contract out until next July. Furthermore, if the bond election doesn’t pass, the city will have paid that money for a design plan they cannot use until they come up with still more funding.
The new library would be located on a 2.3-acre lot owned by the city behind the Bond House Museum on Bond Street. The city’s library task force decided on the location in a meeting last month based on a suggestion by Albin and Community Services Director Len Cata. While some previous discussions referenced the former post office as a possible site for the project, Albin and Cata said they felt that site did not provide enough space for the building, which is slated to be 15,000 square feet, or enough parking to meet anticipated increased demand.
The current library occupies around 5,000 square feet in a Paseo de Oñate building it shares with the Recreation Center. For years Council and community members have raised concerns that the current facility is too small and outdated for the community.
“We need a new library,” District 1 Councilor Danielle Duran said when the Council passed the resolution to bond out the cost of the project. “The current one was intended as an interim facility 30 years ago.”
Based on the city’s current bonding capacity, the city will be authorized to spend as much as $6 million on the new library if the bond issue passes in March, but the actual cost of construction will not be known until the city requests full construction plans. They will not receive those proposals unless the bond election passes, at which point they will be funded from city bonds.
Library Director Teddie Riehl, who started work Monday, said she hasn’t had a chance to review her budget in enough depth to provide comment for this story or input to the city.
There are some other options for fund raising outside the city budget for the design plans, but few of them are solid, Friends of the Library President Joan Quintana said. The Friends are currently in the process of applying for official non-profit status from the state, which may help the organization raise donations. If they are granted that status, the Española Library Board may borrow that status in their own fund-raising endeavors. However, there is very little else either organization can do to help the city find funding, Quintana said.
“They haven’t contacted us about any of that,” she said. “But yes, yes (the state of city funding) bothers me.”
Quintana, as president of the Friends, will be responsible for publicity and campaigning for the bond election, though she was not involved in putting together the request for proposals sent out by the city.
The request promises all bidders that the city has the money to pay for their work, and pledges the city to work out a budget to pay the eventual designer.
That means if the city does not identify a funding source soon, it will be violating those assurances to design bidders, which are part of whatever final agreement is reached, according to the documents .
The plans, funded or otherwise, are scheduled to be chosen and approved at next month’s regular City Council meeting, according to the time line sent out with the city’s request for proposals. Until the outcome of the bond election is known, the city is soliciting only preliminary design plans, which must include several improvements decided upon by the city-appointed library task force. This task force includes the entire library board, two members of the Friends of the Española Library, and three city staff members.