Rancho Bernardo Library Site Uncertain

Rancho Bernardo voters sent library planners back to the drawing board after a weekend straw poll on where a new library should be built.

Voters in the North County suburb chose a site that San Diego city officials have ruled out as too costly to develop and impossible to adapt--a nearby Bank of Rancho Bernardo structure that would require extensive renovation, perhaps even a new building to convert it into a suitable library site.

Bank officials had proposed that San Diego approve a land exchange--the 20,000-square-foot bank building and about $1 million for the existing 6,000-square-foot library building, which will not hold the 46,000 volumes it now contains.

Library use in Rancho Bernardo is the second-highest in the city. Only the main downtown branch circulates more volumes.

A city manager’s office analysis of the bank offer was negative. The manager’s report pointed out that the community would have to raise the money to revamp the bank building or rebuild it and would have to come up with the $1-million additional payment to the bank.

Because the two-story bank building has wooden flooring that will not support bookshelves, the report said, the entire building will probably have to be torn down and a new one built.

Rancho Bernardo residents gave second place in the straw poll to the vacant Allstate Insurance office complex, also near the village commercial center.

“We feel that we have won a victory,” said Rick Griffin, spokesman for developers of the 20-acre former Allstate site. He added that “a small group of retired people with time to campaign for what they want” is the only opposition to the proposal to lease up to 25,000 square feet of space in the structure for $1 a year.

As an added incentive, the developers have offered to buy the existing library’s site from the city for $1.3 million, easily enough to refurbish the Allstate quarters into a top-notch library site.

But, in return, the developers must receive a conditional-use permit from the city to build a 705-unit senior citizens’ residential complex on the Allstate site, a project that was turned down nearly unanimously by the Rancho Bernardo Planning Board.

Friends of the Library, the group promoting the new library, and City Librarian Bill Sannwald came out strongly for a 3-acre site in Bernardo Heights, which placed third in the opinion poll. Property owners there offered to give the city its site if, in turn, the city would permit the construction of six homes on an adjacent 2.56-acre tract.

Carol Mentzer, president of Friends of the Library, said Monday that the Saturday straw vote was just that, the opinion of 2,378 Rancho Bernardo residents out of the more than 30,000 who live there.

“We (Friends of the Library) must take some of the blame for not having informational meetings and getting out all the information we had on all the sites,” Mentzer said “We need the money from the old site to build a new library.”

Mentzer conceded that the residents who voted clearly indicated that they want a new library located in the commercial center of the community, not--as the Bernardo Heights is--several miles from the shopping area along Bernardo Center Drive. But, she said, “half-truths” circulated by proponents of the bank building and the Allstate site, “gave none of the negative factors involved in those sites.”

Sannwald said Monday that the city Library Commission will take up the issue July 9 in a meeting at the library.

City Councilwoman Abbe Wolfsheimer, whose council district includes Rancho Bernardo, plans to let the community make up its own mind about where the library should be built, according to her administrative executive, Joanne Johnson.

However, Johnson pointed out, “it is unrealistic for people in Rancho Bernardo to expect the Allstate site to remain undeveloped. It will eventually be developed into something, commercial offices or senior housing, whether or not the library goes there.”

Two other sites that placed fourth and fifth in the voting were Webb Park, a 4.5-acre privately owned open space near the library offered to the city at no cost by the merchants who must pay for its maintenance, and a city-owned site west of Interstate 15 on the shores of Lake Hodges.