GAINESVILLE – Moving day for the main branch of the Hall County Library is less than two weeks away…you can almost hear the clock ticking down.
Boxes sat neatly stacked almost everywhere, ready for the trip across the street to the library’s temporary home, as the library’s Board of Trustees met one last time in the vintage building Tuesday evening.
It’s been said that if a person thinks they have few possessions in life they need to try to packing them into a box – they will quickly wonder how they got so much stuff!
“We’re packing and we’re cleaning out all kinds of stuff,” Library Director Lisa MacKinney told board members. “It’s absolutely astonishing what we have here buried in closets in a 50-year-old building.”
“We’ve had some real finds,” MacKinney added, “including site surveys and soil samples from when this building opened in 1968-69.”
MacKinney told the trustees that the plan to close the current building March 11 and re-open three weeks later across the street on April 1st was still in place.
She said if work is completed before April 1st it’s possible the doors at the former Turner, Wood and Smith building will open before then. “If we get it done early we don’t want to lose any more hours than we can help.”
She said the process of moving everything from the current building to the temporary location across Northside Drive/ Main Street was being orchestrated by Hall County government using inmate labor. “I know that we could not have done it without their support.”
MacKinney said some of the things still needing to be done at the temporary location include new carpeting, shelving installation, and “there’s a part (of the building) that has been vacant that’s going to require a little bit of TLC, some sheet rock…but we’re moving right along.”
MacKinney said she is hoping to hold a groundbreaking ceremony to mark the start of renovation work on Saturday, March 23 at 1:00 p.m. Looking deeper into her crystal ball she ventured July or August of 2020 as when a ribbon-cutting ceremony might happen to celebrate their return to campus and the end of the $4.2-million project.
During the 18-month relocation normal library hours will remain in place.
Board of Trustees chairman Mark Pettitt and MacKinney presented an update on the renovation project at the Hall County Commission work session the day before and said only two questions were asked by commissioners: “How many parking spots are you going to lose, which is zero, and how far over budget is the project going to be, which is ‘It’s not’, it’s under budget at this point.”
The library’s website has additional information available about the project: click here to be linked to that website.
