APPLETON, Wis. — Julie and Elizabeth Beach are regular visitors to the Appleton Public Library.
What You Need To Know
- Appleton city officials and planners have made changes to plans for a new library
- Changes come after initial bids come in over the $40.4 million budget earlier this year
- The building is still expected to meet the needs of users
Since May, they’ve borrowed and read books from a temporary location in a former Best Buy store while the permanent building gets a massive overhaul.
“Our kids check out a lot of books, so once a week helps us pick up our holds. If our kids have reports, we pick up books,” Julie Beach said. “Elizabeth usually has a few she picks out that we read while we’re here.”
Rows of books, magazines, computers and other media fill the once empty big box store.
“It’s been a good fit,” Julie Beach said. “We are anxious for the regular spot to be back because that’s closer for us and more convent for our everyday things.”
Plans for the library got an overhaul this week after initial bids came in over the $40.4 million budget last year.
Library Director Colleen Rortvedt said among the more significant changes is removing a pair of pavilions from the project and a children’s garden.
Several meetings space and other features have been redesigned and moved. That helped trim some of the excavation costs tied to the project.
“It’s not that everything changed, which is great because we don’t want to rework everything,” Rortvedt said. “We’ve got a really strong design and the bulk of the body of the library didn’t have to have substantial changes.”
She said the new plans will still offer an improvement over the existing library and will offer more parking than the previous set of plans.
“If you’re comparing it to what you’re used to at the old Oneida Street library, it’s going to be such a huge improvement,” Rortvedt said about the overall revised design. “Compared to the previous design, I think it’s a really smart and effective way to accomplish what we need to get done and to still have some really forward-focused spacial layouts that are going to support the work we need to do into the future but in a little more modest way.”
Julie Beach said she and her family will keep making trips to the library at its temporary location until the remodeled building opens.
“It’ll be good to have the permanent spot,” she said. “They’ve done a great job with making this space work, even though it’s really open and kind of loud. It’ll be good to have it back to its permanent location.”
City officials hope to bid the project this spring.