Town council on Wednesday will discuss a report calling for preservation of the Maple Acre Library in Fenwick.
It recommends the replacement of its current addition by a larger up-to-date section.
A special meeting of town council Wednesday will hear from the Maple Acre working group at Pelham Fire Station No. 2 on Welland Rd in Fenwick starting at 6:30 p.m.
The six-member group consists of two members from council, the Pelham Library Board and Friends of Maple Acre Library.
Following a series of public meetings, the group was created to find a way to keep a library building in Fenwick.
It spent the summer and fall researching historical documents, building plans, town building audits, library operations and a 2009 consultant’s report.
The group found Fenwick and North Pelham residents want to preserve the original 1919 section of the Maple Acre building and maintain a library service in the village.
However, a later addition, which requires the most repair work to update, did not have the same historic value.
The working group recommends removing the addition and replacing it with a new 3,500 square-foot section. With the 500-square-foot 1919 section, the building would cover 4,000 square feet.
The new addition would accommodate computers, various technologies, community room and other services beyond books and magazines.
Maple Acre would become something more than a library branch.
“It is apparent that the new branch should not be viewed as a library in a traditional sense, rather, a learning commons that has many different uses, focused meeting the needs of the broadest range of users,” the group says in its report.
It suggests commercial partnerships (cafe, day care, offices) to increase revenue generation at Maple Acre to ensure its continued operation.
Town council will receive the report, discuss it and decide how to act on it.
Funding for any addition could be considered in the town’s 2015 budget. Council will start putting together the capital and operating budgets in December and January.
