New Gainesville library is on hold for now
By Tara Donaldson
One of the casualties of the county's budget crisis is a new library in Gainesville.The library was set to open in 2012 at the intersection of U.S. 15 and Lightner Road but is now on hold indefinitely.
“We got to a very simple bottom line -- what were the things we absolutely had to fund?” said County Executive Melissa Peacor, explaining last week why the library and many other non-critical projects have been cut from the proposed budget.
In 2006, county voters approved a bond referendum for new libraries in Montclair and Gainesville. There have been no new libraries built in the county since 1994 and the bond called for a $24 million, 20,000-square-foot facility near the existing library in Gainesville.
The existing Gainesville Neighborhood Library, located in Long Park in Haymarket, is little more than 2,000 square feet.
The small neighborhood library was more than adequate when it was built in 1987 but the population of western Prince William has since skyrocketed while the library has stayed the same size. Today, the library has only one full-time employee and only two Internet stations.
The new library, if it is ever built, would be about the size of the Bull Run Regional Library outside Manassas and would house a 200-year-old Gainesville farmhouse inside its entryway.
The Bushy Park farmhouse was built sometime in the 1700s on a tract of land once owned by Robert “King” Carter between Old Carolina Road and Groveton Road.
The farmhouse lay in the path of Catharpin Valley Estates, so developer U.S. Homes negotiated an arrangement with Prince William County to move the house about 6.5 miles to the site of the new library. There, it was to become a children's reading room, underneath the library's covered entryway.
“It's just a great old house that deserved to be saved,” Brendon Hanafin, the county's historic preservation manager said shortly after the building was moved in 2004.
The farmhouse now sits on the site of the theoretical library and is in the hands of county historians. But the future of the house and the library are uncertain.
The Board of County Supervisors still has to approved the proposed spending cuts but with serious budget problems and major decreases in state funding, it is unlikely that nonessential projects will be spared.
In fact, officials are hoping now just to avoid closing two of the county's libraries altogether. County staffers say the library system needs to cut $855,000 in the coming year, so they're recommending closing the Lake Ridge and Independent Hill neighborhood libraries.
The Library Board of Trustees is asking supervisors to keep those libraries open and to instead reduce Gainesville and the other neighborhood libraries from 40 to 20 hours each week and to close all of the libraries on Sundays.
The supervisors will make decisions on those and other spending cuts in the coming weeks.