it
H
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Tne Trent Council 1991-1995
T
he fate of the library project lay more pre-
cariously in the hands of the neophyte
council than many people realized.
Only a month after the mayor and eight
councillors were swom into office came very bad
news from quantity surveyors Both Belle Robb.
Detailed estimates of the basic plans put costs at
$10.5 million, almost $3 million more than
calculated the year before. Taxes, parking, land-
scaping and furnishings would push the project to
$13 million. On top of this, the project had already
racked up $292,000 in fees to architect Peter Rose
and $128,000 to others.
"My feeling was that the project was totally out
of scale," says Councillor John Lehnert. "I was
dubious about tearing down the existing annex. "
He was also against the massive new entrance, the
amount of office space for librarians and the area
allocated to children in an aging community. While
the new councillor was the only elected candidate of
the Westmount Finance Action Committee which
had opposed the scheme, he found other colleagues
shared some of his views.
Clearly, without a major revamp or a very slick
exercise in damage control, library renewal was
seriously threatened. Soliciting input from council-
lors John Bridgman and John Lehnert in preparing a
status report, the mayor summoned council mem-
bers to a meeting at his home January 9, 1992, later
to be dubbed the Basement Summit or the Chinese
Dinner Meeting. The session thrashed out the future
of the project. Would council forge ahead with it,
down size or even scrap the whole idea? Change
management or architects? And with what budget,
schedule and cost control?
"We started off around the table in the dining
room eating take-out Chinese food, then we went
down to the basement to continue our discussion,"
the mayor recalls. "The library project was not
something all saw as a priority."
As Councillor Lehnert says: "We were trying
to work out something we could all live with. I was
interested in the library project and I fought very
hard to get it down to what I thought was a
defensible cost."
Obtaining no consensus at the Basement
Summit and working on concerns expressed,
Mr. Trent prepared a plan to scale down the project
so its design and costs would be acceptable not only
to council but also to taxpayers whom he had
promised to poll. His proposal for New Design
and Cost Parameters was ready for presentation
to council on January 20, 1992.
It proposed to pare down the project to a cost
of $7.5 million, the amount originally discussed in
late 1990. Total floor area would be cut back from
33,000 square feet to 27,500. The proposed multi-
purpose room was quashed along with extra frills
such as the reflecting pool. Repairs and restoration
work for the original Findlay building remained
unchanged and the concept of retaining separate
buildings joined by a link (or spine) was kept. But
the Trent proposal skirted the contentious issue of
outright demolition of the 1959 Annex. Instead it
"allowed" demolition of the east (front) wall,
maintained the same basic boundaries as the
existing annex while permitting expansion to the
west (into the greenhouse area behind). Though
council would later adopt the position that it made
economic sense to demolish the entire building,
the compromise at this stage was enough for the
councillors to approve the new proposal and
establish the basic footprint.
"This was the watershed," the mayor recalls.
But only the beginning. "I spent nine months
trying to get them to buy into the project and
make it their own."
There was little time to lose. A new Library
Project Steering Committee was formed January 29,
1992, headed by Raymond Ullyatt and comprising
Mayor Trent and councillors John Bridgman, John
Lehnert and James Wright. While chief librarian
Rosemary Lydon had been a member of the earlier
building committee before the election, there now
was no representation from the library staff, a point
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