Cleator Wants Vote on Library Site : But Official Says It’s too Late for the November Ballot

Mayoral candidate Bill Cleator said Friday that voters should decide whether the proposed new central library should be constructed at the vacant Hillcrest Sears store site, and that he will push to get an advisory measure on the November ballot.

Standing in the parking lot in front of the boarded-up store, Cleator said he will ask the City Council next week to put the measure on the ballot. If the council rejects the request, Cleator said, he will work to qualify the measure as an initiative.

However, city elections officer Jack Fishkin said Friday that it is already too late to put an initiative on the November ballot.

Fishkin said that Cleator and his supporters would first have to publish in a newspaper a notice to circulate a petition for the initiative. Then they would have to wait 21 days before they could begin collecting the 50,000 signatures of registered voters required to qualify the measure for the ballot.

State law allows Fishkin an additional 30 days to verify the signatures after the signatures are collected. Fishkin said the “practical deadline” for initiatives for the city’s November ballot is Wednesday. But even if the deadline was extended another 30 days, Fishkin said, “the timing is just too short” to put Cleator’s proposed initiative on the ballot.

On Friday, Cleator charged that “forces opposed to the Sears site are attempting to manipulate the process by withholding” information about a study done by the Mayor’s Library Task Force, which inspected the site.

But when asked to identify the people or groups allegedly withholding information, Cleator said: “I really can’t identify who these forces are.”

Later, Cleator stood by as a group of supporters repeated charges raised Wednesday that Hannah Edelstein, chairwoman of the 10-member task force that is looking at six possible library sites, is withholding information about the study for political reasons.

Edelstein has acknowledged that the task force chose the 12-acre Sears site on Cleveland Avenue as the best possible location. But she said the task force will not release its findings until the final report is written, probably on June 5, two days after the mayoral election.

Cleator denied that he was making the selection of a new library site a political issue in his mayoral race against Maureen O’Connor. But he told supporters that O’Connor does not want the new library at the Sears site, and reminded them that he was the only council member who did not endorse a City Council proposal to put the library on the City Concourse.

Earlier this month, the council voted to purchase the Sears site for $9.3 million to preserve the city’s option of locating a new central library there and selling the rest of the land to private builders. Cleator said he has not decided if he favors tearing down the building to construct a new library or simply renovating the cavernous, 34-year-old structure.

Cleator said it is an ideal location for the new library because “there is plenty of free parking.”

The lack of parking around the central library at 820 E St. discourages him and other library patrons from using the facility, Cleator said.

“I have problems when I go down there because of parking. I usually use a regional library,” he said.