Yachats commission will ask city council to raze library and instead plan for new $1.46 million building

By QUINTON SMITH/YachatsNews

YACHATS – The Yachats Library Commission voted unanimously Thursday to ask the city council if it can proceed with plans to tear down the library on West Seventh Street and work on a slightly revised design for an entirely new structure.

That’s a departure of 18 months of planning to remodel and expand the 2,400-square foot library by 1,200 square feet.

An engineering firm’s soil tests in September for the expansion found bedrock 20 feet below a mix of sand, clay and water. That meant a foundation under both the new and old sections would have to be stabilized with long rods to tie the two sections together.

That sent construction estimates skyrocketing. So the design-build company suggested it would be cheaper to raze the 50-year-old building and construct a new 3,600-square-foot library.

Their new estimate? $1.46 million. That’s $500,000 more than the city and the Friends of Yachats Library financial support group has on hand. The remodel/expansion estimate was $1.09 million, but $100,000 has been spent so far on planning and design work, said commission chair David Rivinus.

“We have to come up with half a million dollars,” Rivinus told the commission Thursday.

Rivinus said that’s possible by going back to a grant writer it previously hired but never used to see if she could coax money out of state or national organizations that help fund library projects. The commission might also have to ask the city for more money, Rivinus told YachatsNews later, but it hopes to exhaust grants and other fundraising first.

Sue May, a Friends of Yachats Library board member, said her group would support the additional fundraising and help where needed. It has already won a $250,000 grant from The Ford Family Foundation for the project, is holding on to a $150,000 bequest, and has raised other funds for the project. She told the commission that she thought – but couldn’t promise – that the Ford Foundation would be Ok with continuing its support of a revised project so long as the size and location were the same.

With a teardown, Rivinus told the commission that the tall, sloped roofline in the expansion’s design – necessary to tie into the existing building — could be simplified and likely cost less. There may be other savings too, he suggested, without changing the expansion’s footprint and interior layout.

“Before we start compromising the building’s design, let’s see how far we can get with fundraising,” he said.

Commission members said there appeared to be no other good – or less expensive – alternative than to accept the advice of the design/build contractor, find ways to economize without compromising the plan and ask the city council to let it proceed with fundraising, budgeting and tearing down the library.

“… it sounds like there is not much of a choice,” said commission member Naomi Steenson. “Building a new structure entirely seems like the reasonable choice. Let’s move forward with the project. People have waited so many years for this, I don’t want to destroy the momentum.”

Rivinus and the commission had hoped to break ground on the project in August or September.

The expansion idea came up in 2020 when the city hired a consultant to map out the future of one of the city’s most popular services. The city was ready to embark on a modest 400-foot expansion, when Friends of Yachats Library got a $150,000 bequest to add to another $150,000 the city had been given years earlier.

With the consultant’s recommendation for a larger addition, the commission asked for a last-minute pause and then spent another year seeing if there was support – and money – for a bigger project.

The commission paused the project again in 2021 when the pandemic hit and the cost of labor and materials skyrocketed. It resumed planning in mid-2022.

At the start of the current fiscal year, the city had $508,000 in capital reserves for the project, the Friends of Yachats Library holds an additional $450,000, and the expects to to spend $258,000 on construction costs this fiscal year.

The project has been overseen by a work group comprised of two commission members, two former librarians and one library volunteer, with help from Yachats architect Linn West. MD Architect + Design of Coburg is the contractor.