If you haven’t already seen them, you can read the library’s answers to the City’s questions here (large PDF file). It’s over 40 pages long, so I’m not going to paste the text into this blog entry like I did for the questions. I did like this answer, though:

There is a desire to achieve the goals arrived at after extensive study by expert consultants and input from the Peoria public, including over 45 public meetings, and web, in-house and mail comments. However, since building a consolidated branch at Exposition Gardens does not address those goals, we set aside this idea after applying the same tests we did to all other sites. One of the main goals of our building program is to be sure that we are not just doing a temporary fix on our libraries but building for the future.

Here you can see an example of what I said in my previous post. They got public input, they utilized expert consultants, and they ran the Expo Gardens site through an objective criteria. It’s also nice to see that the library is thinking about long-term solutions and not temporary fixes. That way, they won’t have to come back asking for more money in just a few years.

It will be interesting to hear the discussion that ensues Tuesday night at the council meeting.