Fenty to persist with plans for public-private library

Fenty wants to build a new library branch across from the Tenleytown Metro station and allow a developer to build a high-rise apartment building atop the new library. He has encountered fierce resistance from the D.C. Public Library board and D.C. Council members Mary Cheh, D-Ward 3, and Kwame Brown, D-at large, who say the project will line a private developer’s pocket at public expense and slash into needed “green space” at the adjacent Janney Elementary School.

Cheh, Brown and the library board have called for the library to be built without the private real estate development. In a letter to Cheh and Brown, Fenty’s deputy, Neil Albert, said that the joint development is the best way to go.

“…[P]reliminary estimates show that D.C. Public Library will save approximately half of its construction budget under this mixed-use scenario for their new 20,000-square-foot library,” Albert wrote in his Jan. 12 letter. “This amounts to approximately $5 million in cost savings.”

Albert said the mayor is “revising” the project, though, in hopes of winning over skeptics. The letter doesn’t detail the revisions.

It has been a tortured route for the library project over the past two years. The disputed property — 3.6 acres across from the Tenleytown Metro Station — is potentially worth millions in real estate tax dollars. Some neighborhood activists railed against the project because they saw it as disfiguring the area.

Cheh initially supported the mixed-use development, but yanked her support after deciding that the city’s plans were “fatally flawed.”

In November, the library board bucked Fenty and ordered Chief Librarian Ginnie Cooper to build a stand-alone library “as quickly as possible,” using $16 million the board had set aside for the project.

Albert’s letter states that the city will be ready to make a pitch to the public next month and that he hopes that residents will “engage constructively” with the government.