Joint meeting set on library proposal

As a follow-up to a budget meeting last week, the library board, town council’s committee of the whole, and the Rainy River District School Board will meet tonight to discuss possible cost-savings for a new library here.
The meeting will take place at 7:30 p.m. in the committee room downstairs at the Civic Centre.
Library board chair Joyce Cunningham helped co-ordinate the meeting.
She noted yesterday that, according to the Public Library Act, “if one is going to talk about a library building—the buying or selling of property for a library building—and if they’re interested in using the grant that was given to the library, obviously the library board has to be involved.”
Cunningham also will chair tonight’s meeting, and hopes it will be an orderly one where each of the parties listens to what the other is saying.
At last Wednesday’s budget meeting, the committee of the whole spoke at length about receiving a letter from Education Director Jack McMaster regarding a meeting to discuss building a new library in conjunction with a new Robert Moore School as a possible means to achieve cost-savings.
At that same meeting, the library building committee came forward with scaled-down plans for a new library, as council had requested at its March 24 meeting.
While the building committee and library board recommended council endorse a report to allow the drawing revisions and the tendering process to advance, the committee of the whole refused to do so prior to hearing out the school board.
Most recent numbers show the town’s share of the new library project, as it stands with the revised plans, would be about $1,246,000.
This is less than one-third of the total project cost of $3,856,284.