IW proposes building new Windsor library next to Town Center

Isle of Wight County is proposing to scrap a long-planned expansion of the Windsor library and instead build new.

The county had allocated $350,000 in its 2020-21 capital improvements budget to add a manager’s office, bathrooms and an upstairs meeting space and storage to the converted Duke Street facility, but by 2022 had rejected three bids ranging from $627,000 to just under $753,000.

Tony Wilson, the county’s director of public works, advised at the time that the supervisors wait to re-bid the project in hopes that the market would stabilize from a surge in construction costs that resulted from supply-chain delays that emerged in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I was wrong,” Wilson told county supervisors at their Aug. 15 meeting, stating the latest low bid came back at $807,000, or $180,000 higher than two years ago.

“Prices for materials and labor are still at a premium despite the supply chain having recovered,” Wilson said.

The renovation, despite being largely a “stick build,” would have to meet commercial building codes due to its use as a library, part of what’s driving the cost so high, Wilson said. A stick build is a construction term for a building with wood framework rather than steel. The former is typically less expensive to build.

Wilson’s latest recommendation is to instead build a single-story 5,000- to 6,000-square-foot library adjacent to the Windsor Town Center, which sits on land forming the campus of Georgie D. Tyler Middle School and is owned by Isle of Wight County Schools. The town of Windsor leases the town center from the school system for $1 per year.

Wilson estimated the cost of building new at $1.5 million to $2 million. The county could offset that cost by selling the old library, which was last valued at $388,700 during the county’s 2023 reassessment of property values.

Selling the old library would entail negotiating an agreement with the town of Windsor. The county owns the library itself, but the town owns the land it occupies. It was built in 1994 by high school students enrolled in Suffolk’s P.D. Pruden Vocational Center. The assessed value of the library includes the building, its land and the adjacent county-maintained Robinson Park on the same parcel.

A new library adjacent to the Windsor Town Center would likely take the form of a metal building with a brick facade, Wilson said.

Windsor Mayor George Stubbs said that as of Aug. 25 the town had not received any information directly from the county on the latest proposal for a new library.

In 2017 when Windsor drafted designs for a new municipal building on town-owned land at Shirley Drive and Route 460 adjacent to its police station, preliminary illustrations showed a possible future library adjacent to the municipal building.

Windsor’s Town Council resurrected its plans for a new municipal building earlier this year, but to date, those discussions haven’t included the 2017-proposed adjacent library, Stubbs said.