Dill Dennis, design team leader for MFMFM, shows off designs for the city library among other buildings and residential areas around Lawrence on Tuesday afternoon at Spring Hill Suites, 1 Riverfront Plaza. A team of designers has been working on the plans and sketches for the last week.

There’s at least one certainty about the city’s discussion regarding a new $30 million downtown library: It’s not moving at a “Da Vinci Code” pace.

More like “War and Peace” – slow and painstaking.

City commissioners at Tuesday night’s meeting ultimately decided to hold a study session sometime in April to figure out where they should rank the library in the list of overall community priorities.

That decision came after commissioners in December said they wanted to have more information about the project and how it fit into the community’s bigger picture. The latest delay, though, means the subject likely won’t come back up until after the April 3 City Commission election.

But library supporters said they were still optimistic about the project.

“I feel like it is still moving forward,” said Shawn Hastie, a mother of two who came to the commission meeting to urge support for the library. “It takes a lot of time, but it is a large project. It shouldn’t be taken lightly.”

What commissioners said they wanted to do in April is to have a list from staff of all the major capital improvement and maintenance projects that the community is facing. With that list, commissioners said they would then be able to rank where the library fits into their priorities.

“Part of the problem is we keep talking about prioritizing, but we really haven’t sat down and done it,” City Commissioner Sue Hack said.

Open to other sites

If the April study session places the library as a high enough priority, Mayor Mike Amyx said the city then should decide whether it supports the library board’s recommendation to build the project on the site of the current post office at Seventh and Vermont streets. Commissioners hardly touched on that topic at all Tuesday night.

Commissioners did hear, though, that some library leaders are open to considering other sites, if commissioners are not taken with the proposal put forward by members of the Fritzel family, which has included the library as part of a larger Vermont Street redevelopment.

“I don’t think it is as critical to us where the library is as it is that we have a new library,” said Deborah Thompson, a member of the city’s library board. “We recommended a site because you asked us to pick one.”

Amyx said if commissioners could settle on a site, then the city would need to put out a request for proposals to hire an architect to create a conceptual design that could be presented to voters. All five commissioners reaffirmed previous statements that the project would need to be taken to a citywide election.

Commissioners also heard city staff members repeat that a new library project almost certainly would require a tax increase.

“I think we have made it clear that we can’t take this project on with existing resources,” City Manager David Corliss said.

Corliss and his staff have crunched numbers that show the city property tax rate for the library would need to increase from about 3 mills to about 7 mills to pay for the construction and operation of a new $30 million library. A mill is $1 in property tax for every $1,000 in taxable value in property that a person owns.

Corliss also has said a new sales tax could be used to pay for the library. That could include a new sales tax from 0.15 percent to 1 percent, depending on the number of years the city wanted to finance the project.

Commissioners heard from both supporters of the project and from those who had questions about whether the community could afford it.

“A new library really is warranted,” said Kathleen Morgan, a member of the library board who told commissioners that the library could be a great economic development tool because it could serve as resource for small businesses. “We have ignored it for too long. We should treat this like our basic infrastructure. It is a basic part of the fabric of the city.”

Joe Patterson, a longtime Lawrence resident, said he wanted architects to re-evaluate their determination that it was not feasible to add a second story to the building. If that is still determined to be unworkable, he said the city should consider less expensive satellite libraries.

“A $30 million library is an awful lot of money to spend when we have a lot of needs,” Patterson said.