Groundbreaking Planned for Mission College Library : Education: The $11-million building to open in 1997 will put the campus one step closer to completion.

In a long-awaited step toward completion of Mission College, trustees of the Los Angeles Community College District have awarded a contract to build an $11-million combined library and learning resources building on the Sylmar campus.

A groundbreaking for the three-level, 57,000-square-foot project has been scheduled in about a month. The complex is expected to be open for the college’s 5,800 students by the fall of 1997, said Shari Borchetta, an assistant to Mission President Jack Fujimoto.

The small makeshift library the college now uses is housed in the basement of another campus building. Mission College, founded in 1975 and the youngest of the district’s nine campuses, is the only one without its own library building, officials said.

The district’s board of trustees voted 7-0 Wednesday night to award the $7.8-million construction contract to Lewis Jorge Construction Management Inc. of Orange. The remainder of the project’s cost consists of planning expenses and nearly $2.4 million in equipment and furnishings.

The project will include a 24,425-square-foot library on its second floor, about three times the size of the current library space; a 20,575-square-foot computer center and tutoring center on the first floor, and a 9,700-square-foot basement with a teleconference center and audio-video studio.

When the project is completed, the number of computer terminals available to Mission students will increase from 130 to about 530. And the library, which now can display only about half of its 43,000 volumes, will be able to display the rest and purchase about 8,000 more, Borchetta said.

The project will be built along Hubbard Street. Construction funds for the complex came from Prop. 153, a $900-million state higher education bond measure approved by voters in June 1992. The equipment and furnishing funds will come from state revenue bonds.

For most of the period between 1975 and 1991, when the college itself operated out of various storefronts and other locations, its library was housed in a former Kress store building in the city of San Fernando, said Rayma Greenberg, chair of the Library Department.

The original plans submitted to the state in the early 1980s for the Sylmar campus, which opened in fall 1991, included a library building, Borchetta said. But it was not approved as part of the original construction. Now, the library will be the fifth permanent building on the Sylmar campus.

Because of cost constraints, the current project is about one-third smaller than the library originally envisioned for the campus. However, Borchetta said, the complex was designed to permit expansion to the original size if enrollment grows and funds are available.

Greenberg, who has run the library since its inception, said she is pleased about approval of the project but also worried about the district’s financial ability to staff and maintain it in the future. “It’s exciting on one hand, but it’s also a concern on the other,” she said.