City: We’ll rent library to county for $180K a year

STEVENS POINT – City officials have offered to charge Portage County $180,000 a year to rent the library’s current site or to move the library into the former Copps building along Church Street.

Documents obtained by Stevens Point Journal Media under Wisconsin Open Records Law show that the city offered a lease option to the county of paying $4 a square foot on the total size of the library for 15 years.

Library Director Bob Stack said the library would not be able to afford such a lease agreement.

“In terms of the library’s budget, absolutely not,” Stack said. “We’re not going to get any new money from the county. That would be crippling.”

The county has been operating under an agreement with the city in which the Library Board, in lieu of paying rent, has paid for the day-to-day operations of the library through the county’s tax levy, according to a letter by Stack.

A letter sent to Stevens Point Mayor Andrew Halverson by William Zimdars, president of the Library Board, indicates that the city also was interested in moving the library out of the downtown area to the Church Street site.

“The City’s second proposal to move the Library to the former Copps building on Church Street is puzzling,” the letter states. “Determining a site for a public library building is not as simple as finding a vacant building and dumping it there.”

Halverson said the former Copps building was a calculated choice of suggestion and that it was one of about five locations the city suggested as alternatives for the library. The building is near plenty of people who can walk there and is suitably designed for a library, he said.

“The building is wide open and easily retrofittable,” Halverson said.

If the library relocated, the city would be interested in moving its headquarters to the library’s building downtown, the mayor said.

“The city has always been interested in broadening the conversation,” he said. “The county has space issues and concerns; so does the city.”

Halverson said it would be short-sighted to focus only on the library, rather than look at space needs for both municipalities at the same time.

Documents obtained under the records law show that the city would be willing to transfer ownership of its 27 percent of the County-City Building, at 1515 Strongs Ave., and terminate the city’s lease of the 14 percent of that building occupied by the city’s Police Department.

At a Monday meeting, Halverson announced that the county had made an offer to the city to enter into a 20-year lease agreement for $100,000 a year on Friday and then rescinded the offer Monday.

County Board representative Don Jankowski, who chairs the Portage County Library Lease Negotiations Team, said the offer letter was sent by mistake. He declined to comment further on the issue until after the team’s next meeting on Friday.

According to the meeting’s agenda, the team will discuss strategy for the conduct of negotiations with the city in closed session.

Halverson said at the special City Council meeting Monday that future conversations and negotiations pertaining to the matter would take place in sessions open to the public.

Stack said he thinks it would benefit the county in the public’s eyes if the meetings were held in open session.

“I suspect that the county feels it’s being very open to suggestions and very open to trying to reach an agreement,” he said. “I suspect they feel that if a lot of this was done in open session, the public would be aware of that.”

Sari Lesk can be reached at 715-345-2257. Follow her on Twitter as @Sari_Lesk.