A formal plan to replace the downtown Victoria branch of the Greater Victoria Public Library (GVPL) could be in place by 2022, according to Mayor Lisa Helps.

 

Responding to a constituent's social media message regarding Calgary’s newly-built $245 million central library in the city’s East Village, Mayor Helps stated in an early November Twitter post that “If all goes well and my council agrees, by the end of the term [the City will] have a plan in place for a new central library.”

 

The mayor’s message gives hope to a decades-long pursuit of replacing Broughton Street’s “round peg in an ugly square hole” of a library, as Kim Westad of the Times Colonist described the two-storey facility in 2009.

 

Back then newly-elected Mayor Dean Fortin considered a new downtown library a top priority, albeit one plagued by financial commitments brought upon by Victoria’s now infamous on-budget-but-over-budget Johnson Street Bridge project, a new Royal Jubilee Hospital patient care tower, an urgent need to replace the City’s #1 Fire Hall, a solution to an aging Crystal Pool complex and the local taxpayer’s split of a billion dollar sewage treatment plant.

 

In 2003 a consultant’s report identified a new central library branch would require a minimum of 121,000 square feet to meet the population’s needs. Cost estimates were in the range of $30 million, not including land acquisition. Even with a sense of what was needed and its cost, replacement plans failed to move forward in light of the City's commitments to more pressing funding pressures. 

 

Victoria’s penchant for a purpose-built downtown library stems back to 1980 when the GVPL moved out of its stately Carnegie Building on Yates Street at Blanshard Street to occupy space in a newly-built provincially-owned office complex that misjudged market conditions and remained largely void of tenants. Although the space was modern and an improvement over the constraints of the previous location, the library’s presence in a building suited for lawyers and accountants was quickly viewed as a marriage of convenience rather than a step up for a growing city.

 

Fast-forwarding to the present, the $63 million Johnson Street Bridge project is nearly completed at $105 (save for final public realm improvements and ‘fendering’), a $35.9 million replacement for the #1 Fire Hall is making its was through the civic planning process, a $70 million modernized Crystal Pool is at the forefront of council’s honey-do list (however, as of today, November 22nd, the City has dropped Central Park as the new pool's location in favour of the Save-On-Foods Memorial Centre's parking lot) and the $283 million patient care tower is several years old.

 

With so much accomplished over the last decade the potential for a purpose-built downtown library is closer than ever, if all goes well. C

 

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