The Daviess County Public Library parking lot is finally undergoing a renovation and expansion, a project more than 6 years in the making. Some citizens are unhappy about it, primarily citing the destruction of roughly .3 to .4 acres of green space. However, library officials said a public survey indicated a bigger lot as one of the top desires among visitors, also noting DCPL has a dedicated public green space — and it’s only about 20 yards away.
Library Director Erin Waller said the idea for the parking lot renovation began before she stepped into her role nearly 6.5 years ago. She said there was a bigger project planned by a previous director and board that included expanding and improving the parking lot, and it was part of a bigger project which would have included an expansion of the building out to the south end for a meeting space.
Waller said officials decided to scale that project back to just do an interior remodel of the second floor, scrapping the parking lot remodel for the time.
“At the time, those bids were coming back more than we really wanted to pay for it since we were doing the material work. So it’s always sort of been on the back burner,” Waller said.
Then in 2020 DCPL completed their newest strategic plan, and that was detailed in a public document in March 2021.
“We always do this,” Waller said. “We have a plan that we go by for everything that we do. And when we do it, we survey the community and ask them ‘where would you like to see the library go, what kinds of things can we improve, what can we do for you,’ basically. One of the top things that we were getting feedback from through that survey — and verbally anytime we had a bigger event or just on a regular basis — was that they wished that we had more parking and that our parking lot was improved.”
The public survey was completed pre-pandemic and had 1,462 respondents. According to the strategic plan document, most participants lived within the city limits of Owensboro, were aged 31-40, used the library weekly, and mostly checked out physical material.
Per the document, respondents were given a list of 10 options as the biggest obstacle facing the library. The parking lot being too busy placed second with 20% of the vote, behind only “other” at 37% — with “the parking lot being difficult to maneuver” being given as some of the “other” responses.
When asked what new services the library needs, an expanded/improved lot was chosen by 562 respondents — tied for second with the option of delivering physical material to rural areas. Meeting spaces for groups was narrowly chosen the most with 585 votes.
The same survey was also conducted among staff post-pandemic. The results were largely the same, with the parking lot concerns placing second and third in the same questions categories, respectively.
So, Waller and the DCPL board decided to look at the project again.
“We took the plans that we’ve had for several years and made a few tweaks,” Waller said.
The project includes making the entrance on Ford Avenue bigger, and changing the layout of the parkings spaces. Currently the aisles between spaces run parallel to the building; they will be rotated to run perpendicular to make it easier to walk from a car to the entrance of the building. They are also adding a drive-up book drop.
Once they decided to take on the project, more detailed plans started developing about a year ago. Waller said it’s been discussed in every board meeting, which is open to the public. Multiple news articles have been published about the plans by various media outlets as plans have progressed, and DCPL — as required by law — published public notices that they were seeking bids for the project. Two months ago, the board approved a bid and the project was contracted out, and the lot has already been cleared.
“It’s not been a secret,” Waller said. “All of our meetings are public, and we always have a reporter at the meeting so anything that’s discussed is printed. We’re just trying to do what our community has asked us to do to make the library better.”
Still, it wasn’t until construction on the lot began that some citizens started to raise concerns and try to stop the project.
An online petition was created by a family whose house backs up to the lot, which has been owned by DCPL for several years.
The petition reads in part, “Our family played in it and made countless memories and the last 8 years will be gone. Many animals have lost homes from the construction because of tearing down trees and the ground dug up. Also, with this land being right by our house it will be very disturbing to our everyday lives with cars coming in and out.”
In roughly a month, the online petition has gained about 740 virtual signatures. Most of the people, in line with the original messaging of the petition, said they signed to support keeping a green space (although the petition was created after the project had been contracted out, and work began the morning after it was created). One neighbor also sent a message to Owensboro Times with a similar complaint.
Waller said while it was technically green space, it wasn’t actually safe. She also noted that about 20 yards away, DCPL has a green space with play equipment and benches; it’s also nearly the same size as the lot being converted to parking.
“We have green space that’s open to the public and the kids can play,” Waller said. “And the thing that they may not realize about that lot is that it was very overgrown, and we were having difficulty monitoring that. There was evidence of some unsavory activities happening at nighttime in that lot. Now it’s cleared out and we can monitor it and be able to keep it a little bit safer for the neighborhood. We still have green space that anybody that wants to can use at any time.”
In an update to the petition, some concern shifted to saying there was a lack of transparency about the project. The update, which included a response from the library board noting the survey responses and the dedicated reading space, reads in part: “Not one time was anyone in the neighborhood contacted and told about the plans. Never was any consideration given to placing parking spaces 8ft from our bedroom window and the value of our property. … I cannot imagine that any of [the board members] would feel any different if this had been done to them. No one from the library has ever reached out to us even once.”
Waller again noted that they’ve discussed the project on numerous occasions in a public setting, and that developments have been published in news articles. She admitted that she had originally planned to notify neighbors of the lot, but work started sooner than expected.
“I had planned on sending a letter to our direct neighbors,” she said, noting that it’s not required by DCPL to notify neighbors when making renovations to the library’s lot. “The project started sooner than I was told it was gonna start … once you sign the contract, if a subcontractor is ready to go they just show up, and so that’s what happened. It was very dramatic because it was a demo of that lot. There has been a letter now that details the rest of the construction to the neighbors here on the block, but I wish I’d been able to get that out sooner.”
Some complaints also then shifted to the funding of the renovation/expansion. There were no responses the first time bids were accepted, but there was one response the second time. The project will cost approximately $678,000 and is being paid for out of the library’s reserve fund. Waller said the expense is so high because of some “extensive” drainage work that must be done.
She said there will be no tax increase and the reserve fund will be replenished through the normal revenues at the library.
“There’s been no talk of this having any effect on our tax rate. There’s no need for it to,” Waller said.
A final concern that was hinted at in the initial petition and then specifically mentioned in an update revolves around the number of visitors to the library.
As provided to Owensboro Times by Waller, the physical patron count of visitors (measured as Fiscal Years from July-June) is as follows:
- 2018 – 314,692
- 2019 – 273,341
- 2020 – 201,075
- 2021 – 141,622
- 2022 – 179,000
Waller said the 2019 numbers dipped because of a ransomware attack in which DCPL lost data and was closed for “a little bit.” The 2020 and 2021 numbers took a big hit due to the pandemic, but Waller said DCPL is starting to return to pre-pandemic numbers.
Programming and event attendance for those same years are as follows:
- 2018 – 16,772
- 2019 – 17,862
- 2020 – 29,853
- 2021 – 2,401
- 2022 – 17,418
Though the original petition said the expansion would be disturbing due to cars coming in and out, it also said the expansion was unneeded because “normal parking lot is only full about 3 times a year.” An updated reads “at the risk of beating a dead horse, the parking lot is never full (the board themselves have said they didn’t know it wasn’t full and were leaning on the director telling them it was full) and only has issues when the high school lets out due to lack of enforcement from the library at keeping the waiting parents out of the parking lot.”
The latest update reads, in part, “Why would we need more parking for less and less people actually coming to use the library in person?”
Waller said she and the board (Michelle Drake, Rodney Ellis, Beena Vora, Susan Gesser, and Harry Pedigo) are aware of the concerns. She said she understood people were upset with the abruptness of the work beginning, but reiterated that the project itself has been made public on numerous occasions.
Waller said that while things have died down over the last week, she expects some visitors at the board meeting next week.
