AVON — The Lorain Public Library System board of trustees voted Thursday to ask Avon City Council to place both issues on the November ballot at Council’s next regular meeting. The library cannot by itself place items on the ballot.

The LPLS is poised to place a bond issue and operating levy for a new 30,000-square-foot library before Avon voters this November.

The bond issue would generate up to $12 million to be paid back over 25 years, and the new 2.31-mill operating levy would bring in $1.75 million a year.

Residents passed a five-year, 1.2-mill renewal operating levy for the current Avon branch library off Harvest Drive in 2006 that brings in $392,000 a year. The new levy would not expire unless the library system wanted it to, either to increase or decrease the amount of money generated.

“Public libraries are so much more to our patrons than they might have been a generation ago,” said LPLS director Joanne Eldridge. “They are expected to provide not only sources of information but also entertainment and leisure activities and to be community gathering places.”

Eldridge said Avon’s increasing population makes moving into a larger facility a necessity. She said the Avon branch’s circulation increased by 50 percent between 2000 and 2008, and program attendance nearly doubled, from 2,264 to 5,303, over the same period.

The proposed new library would provide more space for books, DVDs and CDs, a drive-up window to pick up and return materials, a quiet reading room and more space for computers with Internet connections.

If the ballot measures pass, construction could begin in the spring of 2010, with the new library opening on a six-acre plot of land in the new city municipal complex off Detroit Road the following year.

The current 10,400-square-foot library, which was built in 1994 after the Avon branch outgrew the old town hall it had been housed in since 1956, would remain open during construction and would be converted into an operations center for the library system.

Contact Adam Wright at 329-7129 or awright@chroniclet.com.

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