A surprisingly small group of people turned out to offer input to the Liberty Park Library Building Steering Committee at their open house Tuesday night at the Renton Community Center.
Twenty people attended the event and told committee members what they’d like to see the building used for in the future. The library over the Cedar River is being converted to another use as the King County Library System will build a new library at the former Big 5 Sporting Goods store in downtown Renton on Third Street.
“I am disappointed that we did not have more people to turn out to make comments about what they would like the future of the library building to be used for,” said Francine Siverts, committee member. “And also to express their feelings and their concerns so that we could address those in the steering committee for the Renton Library.”
For the few that trickled into the meeting room, they added their visions for the space to white posters tacked up on the walls around the room. The boards held ideas such as “conference center, museum space, learning/play center, salmon environmental center and park dept. classes: puppets, pottery, jewelry.”
Renton resident Annie Hetzel loves the building and its location and wants to see something meaningful done with the space. She brought her kids there when they were younger but doesn’t frequent it as much anymore. Hetzel added her thoughts to the poster boards which included creating a nature or environmental interpretive center with exhibits and displays capturing the history of the place, including salmon.
“And I’d like to see it have a regional appeal,” she said. “I think if it was done really nicely there would be people coming in from other places to see it.”
Dan Palmer was still disgruntled over the fact that the library is moving to Third Street, but he thought he would share his ideas for the soon-to-be old library building over the Cedar River.
“Even though I prefer to see it stay where it’s at, coming here is what I refer to as my safety net,” Palmer said. “Because if it moves, the library then – we want the building itself to have its best use to represent the community. So that’s a safety net.”
Palmer saw ideas already posted on the boards for uses that represent a diverse space, which is what he had in mind.
“You can listen to a client, you can listen to their wants and needs, but you really have to hear it,” said Gary Barber, chair of the committee. “And that’s what I want to do.”
He heard a lot of echoing of ideas that have already been bounced around in the steering committee in terms of the space’s goals.
“It’s really a gem sitting right over the river,” Barber said. “So, why not highlight that? A library can only take it so far, but if we had the chance to open it up a little bit more, to expose it a little bit more to the surrounding community… get people to go, that’s where I want to go.”
Committee vice chair, Marvin Rosete hoped that this first open house would be telling of people’s feelings on the building’s future use.
“Like every other committee we’re going to use that as analysis, so that when we go to our committees, we’re going to say here’s what the public has said,” Rosete said. “And then we’ll deliberate on exactly how the public is feeling.”
The committee has planned to do more open houses and get feedback from an online survey at www.rentonwa.gov.
The committee will get a presentation on the city’s museum master plan and the arts and cultural plan next. In December it will get down to business sifting through all of the information and feedback they will have collected and begin arriving at their proposal for the library’s future use.
