The San Diego city manager’s office is poring over a schedule for putting a central library in East Village, following the City Council’s decision to place it there.
Deputy City Manager Bruce Herring said the city is researching a way to expedite the project schedule. At the same time, it is working to relocate the police department’s vehicle maintenance shop.
The library will replace the police yard, which is bounded by 11th and 12th avenues and J and K streets. It will sit a few hundred feet northeast of the proposed ballpark, on a new avenue that will cut diagonally through Downtown’s grid of streets and provide a link between Balboa Park and San Diego Bay.
The council vote earlier this month was a rejection of alternate plans to build a new library on Broadway, near the existing main library, or on Kettner Boulevard near the Santa Fe Railway Depot.
Councilwomen Barbara Warden, Valerie Stallings and Judy McCarty dissented in the 6-3 vote.
The City Council last year approved a $130 million financing plan for the central library; money will come from transient occupancy tax backed up with tobacco litigation settlement payments.
And it previously approved a conceptual design for the library.
The ballpark-area alternative picked by the council has 10 stories, 433,400 gross square feet and 361,300 net square feet under a domed roof. Initially the building would have more space than the library would need; the city could lease that space out in the near-term and use the revenue to offset the building costs, said Herring.
The city will need a minimum of three to four years to build the library, Herring said, noting architectural plans alone will take a minimum of 18 months to complete.
A funding plan assumes the city would get bond proceeds to begin construction by 2003 and finish it by 2005. That is “subject to review,” Herring said.
Downtown-based Rob Wellington Quigley FAIA is the library architect.
