Council Rejects Sears Site for New Library : Idea of Using Property Bought for $9 Million Abandoned; Downtown Location to Be Sought

After spending $9 million to buy the old Sears store in Hillcrest as a possible site for a new central library, the San Diego City Council on Tuesday voted to abandon the Sears property in favor of locating the new library somewhere downtown.

In a companion action, the council voted to hire a consultant for $65,000 to prepare a development plan for the 12-acre Sears site on Cleveland Avenue near University Avenue. When completed next December, the plan would be used as the basis for private development of the site.

As he had during his unsuccessful mayoral campaign, Councilman Bill Cleator again led the fight for building a 375,000-square-foot central library on the Sears property. He pointed to surveys of library users at the existing central library on E Street downtown who favored relocating to Sears.

He decried those in the downtown “Establishment” who wanted the library kept downtown. There are “people who want to use it (a new downtown library) as an attraction . . . to help them sell shirts . . . (but) they aren’t the honest-to-God users of the library,” Cleator argued.

But unlike last May, when Cleator was able to persuade his colleagues to buy the old Sears site, this time there were not enough votes. He was opposed by everyone on the council except Gloria McColl and Judy McCarty.

Leading the effort to construct the library downtown were Mayor Maureen O’Connor and Councilman Mike Gotch. O’Connor, suffering from a cold that forced her to turn the chairmanship of the meeting over to Deputy Mayor William Jones, kept her remarks brief, explaining that she had made a campaign promise to keep the library downtown.

The mayor said she would consider either rebuilding the existing library or moving to some other downtown location altogether.

At Gotch’s urging, the City Council voted, 8-1, to “commit to a center city location as yet unspecified.” As part of the vote, the city manager’s office was directed to review and analyze possible downtown library sites and report back to the council’s Public Services and Safety Committee in early 1987.

A measure to include Balboa Park and the old Navy Hospital as part of the city manager’s study of downtown locations, suggested by Councilwoman Abbe Wolfsheimer, was defeated on a 7-2 tally.

What was left unclear was how the latest study of downtown sites might differ from a major study conducted by the Centre City Development Corp., the city’s downtown redevelopment agency, last year that pinpointed the Community Concourse as the best place for a new, high-rise library.

“I’m not sure we want to be the lead group,” Gerald Trimble, CCDC executive vice president, said in an interview. “We’d like to see it (library relocation) resolved. I think they ought to use what we’ve done as a jumping-off place.”

A little more than year ago, five members of a City Council committee agreed with the Community Concourse location. But early this year, when Sears announced that it was vacating its venerable store on Cleveland Avenue in the resurgent Hillcrest neighborhood, the City Council decided to explore the building and parking lot as a possible site for a library.

In May, the council voted to buy the property for $9.3 million, mainly to meet a deadline imposed by Sears and at the same time keep the city’s options open. The price was later lowered to $9 million.