The Blackburn Building at N. 100 East St. in Joseph is seen in this file photo. Plans are to use the building as the new home of the Joseph City Library. 

JOSEPH — The Joseph City Council started its meeting on Thursday, Oct. 5, by listening to a presentation about plans to remodel an old medical building for the city’s new library.

Some two hours later, members of the council and Mayor Lisa Collier ended the meeting by airing concerns about the price tag and scope of the proposal — and Collier said she would schedule a work session between the council and the library’s board of directors to address those concerns.

The city plans to move its library, now located in cramped quarters in Joseph City Hall, to the Blackburn Building, just down the hill from Joseph Charter School. The former medical office is being remodeled, but the city needs to find additional funding for the project.

At the front end of the meeting, the council heard a progress report about the library from civil engineer Jim Nave, of Devco Engineering, who’s been working on the project since 2022.

The renderings Nave showed the council depicted a 1,600-square-foot space with movable bookshelves, a meeting room and enlarged windows to allow more natural light. One challenge facing the designers, he said, was that the entryway would have to be redesigned so it meets Americans with Disabilities Act standards.

Sara Miller, of the Northeast Oregon Economic Development District, which is helping the library raise money for the project, briefed the council on fundraising. She said the effort already has secured more than $450,000, largely from city donations of the building and work on the site.

The project faces two additional “milestones,” she said. Milestone No. 2 involves getting the library open for occupancy, with an estimated price tag of $408,926. The third milestone is for site enhancements such as landscaping, and that’s estimated at $122,323. She emphasized that those numbers included a 23% factor for contingencies and inflation. Miller said she was hopeful that private foundations could provide much of that money, along with private donations.

When Nave and Miller asked for questions after their 20-minute presentation, Councilor Stephen Bartlow offered a foreshadowing of the conversation councilors would have at the end of the meeting.

“I wanted to ask about a couple of cost questions,” Bartlow said, and asked about the cost of the windows depicted in the architectural renderings (roughly three to four times the cost of regular windows) and the price tag of the landscaping.

Near the end of the meeting, during a section reserved for comments from councilors, Bartlow returned to the library, noting that the total price tag for the project was about $1 million.

“It strikes me as being very costly and that we could provide a really nice library for less,” he said. “I may be the lone voice. I’m OK with that, I’ve had that before.”

He said he wanted a nice library, too, but the project “just seems kind of expensive to me.”

Bartlow was not the lone voice.

“I feel the same way,” Collier said. “I feel like they’re shooting for a Cadillac when maybe we should be looking at Fords. … We love our little library, I love our librarian, but we don’t even have the foot traffic in my mind to justify a million-dollar project and building. I love that we have a library. I love that we have the service, but it’s a huge price tag.”

Other councilors expressed similar concerns, and Collier said she would set up a work session between the council and the library board. It was not clear at press time if the work session had been scheduled.

Members of the library board could not be reached for comment.