Rosemount library report should be made public, says group wanting expansion

A group advocating for the city's oldest library branchis calling upon the City of Ottawa to publicly release a report suggesting the heavily-used library shouldn't be expanded.

The Rosemount Expansion and Development Group (READ) says the Rosemount branch of the Ottawa Public Library in the city's Hintonburg neighbourhoodis the busiestlibrary in terms of circulation and visits per square feet.

READ says it's time for the branch to be expanded since it was built in 1918 andhasn't had any major renovations since 1982, while the neighbourhood it serves has grown "substantially."

The Ottawa Public Library board commissioned a $100,000 study on expanding or modernizing the branch, which READ chair Richard Van Loon said the board received several weeks ago.

However,the report hasn't been made public, and READ wasn'table to studyit until they got a bootleg copy now posted to their websitea few days ago.

"If it turns out that expansion is very difficult or impossiblewe want to know why and we'd liketo be involved in the actual planning of what will happen," he said.

Report goes against expansion

The report recommends against expansion because of how old and how close to a soon-to-be-completedcondo the library is, claiming the cost of adding a third floor would be comparable to demolishing the building and replacing it with a newthree-storeybuilding on the same site.

Van Loon said the cityshould keep looking at adding a floor because replacing the building isn't likely.

"A third floor addition that adds more space wouldserve the existing vast overcrowding of the place better thatwould be a great solution if a way could be found to do it," he said.

Van Loon saidthe city has committed a million dollars to the Rosemount branch in the 2017 library board budget.

"Where did that number come from? It's certainly not a number that's come up in thereport that we've seen, it seems to be a sort of off the top of the head number" he said.

"Even if expansion isn't possible,a million dollars isn't an awful lot [of money] to do a re-fitof a library that is egregiously overcrowded and technically very obsolete."

The study is scheduled to be discussed at the library board's meeting on Dec. 1.Ottawa Public Library Board Chair Tim Tierney was not available for comment.