Plan to Temporarily Close Thousand Oaks Library Advances

Plans to shut down the earthquake-damaged Thousand Oaks Library temporarily and relocate the collection advanced Tuesday night as the City Council approved an agreement with Amgen Inc. to lease the former City Hall.

Under the agreement with Amgen, the city can use 60,000 square feet in the former City Hall the company owns at 2400 Willow Lane to house the library’s entire collection for as long as 15 months.

The space available in the Willow Lane building is roughly equivalent to the size of the Janss Road library, officials said.

“It’s a good fit,” library deputy director Steve Brogden said. “And it’s a very nice building.”

The move should be completed in early March, city officials said. It will take several weeks to move the entire collection of 290,000 books, magazines, tapes and reference materials. But the temporary inconvenience is worth the trouble, officials said.

The council voted 3 to 0, with Mayor Jaime Zukowski abstaining from the vote because her husband is an Amgen employee. Although the spacious, modern main structure is frequently hailed as the finest library in Ventura County, the Janss Road building has had a troubled history. The roof has leaked during every major rainstorm since its construction, prompting occasional closures, and the facility was nearly devastated by the Jan. 17, 1994, earthquake.

The library has already been moved once, immediately after the earthquake, when librarians and volunteers packed up key reference materials and fled to the Newbury Park branch for several months to allow crews to clean up the mess from the quake.

The library was reopened in April, but some major repairs are still needed. With the library vacated, the repairs may take as little as nine months. If construction crews were to undertake the repairs on a piecemeal basis, they would not be expected to finish before June, 1996, city officials said.

The move will not cost the city anything, City Manager Grant Brimhall said. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has agreed to pay all moving costs to and from the Janss Road branch, and to reimburse the city for the $40,000-a-month rent. FEMA, which had already agreed to cover most of the costs of the damage done by the Northridge quake, will actually save money because of the relocation, Brimhall said, because construction will take less time.

“It also makes it a much safer and more convenient construction project,” he said. “It reduces the complexity of putting up scaffolding. When it’s done, it will be beautiful and safe, with a roof that doesn’t leak and a ceiling that doesn’t fall.”

Repairs to the chronically leaking roof are nearly finished, and require only a little caulking to be complete. Most of the building’s ceiling tiles fell during the quake and have to be replaced.

All the carpets had to be taken up after the quake, and the idea of putting in new ones while patrons browsed among the bookshelves and reading areas was daunting, library officials said. Also, all the drywalls have to be replaced.

“The public and staff would be dealing with construction and all that entails,” Brogden said. “Parts of the collection would be unavailable. By moving out we can complete it much faster. Frankly, it is a much safer situation if the public and staff aren’t in a construction area.”

While he isn’t looking forward to the move, Brogden said he is looking forward to the end result.

“We’re a little weary of the warehouse motif,” he said.