Watertown. Wisconsin

WATERTOWN, WI SCONS IN occurred on August 19th. Miron Construction Co. of Neenah, WI won the construction contract, coming in with a bid of $6,632,696, which was the lowest and comfortably under budget. The architect, StudioGC of Chicago, designed the new building and managed the bid process. When complete, the new Watertown Library Center will include a 180-person meeting space to support large events and programming, several small meeting rooms, a drive-up book drop, and a 3,000-square -foot TalkReadPlay Center for children. A glass wall will overlook the town square, providing a fantastic view and natural light to the 1984 section of the library. Most of the project funds were raised by the Key to Opportunity community fundraising campaign that concluded successfully last fall thanks to the partnership and generosity from the Greater Watertown Community Health Foundation, which donated $2.5 million, as well as many area businesses and patrons. In addition, Fish-Peterson reports that there is a vacant city parking lot of about three quarters of begins. “That allowed the City, in conjunction with the Redevelopment Authority, to purchase six buildings on one block. The RDA has torn them down and what will go in their place is our town square. The area will lead to a curbless street that segues into our historic Carnegie library, which is directly across the street to the west, where the city has acquired two other properties and the expanded library will go on there. So, in two blocks in our downtown, the City invested $4.3 in the library and we’ll be investing about a million in the town square.” “We have a preliminary design completed, now, for the town square, and we are entering our fundraising and final design phase in the next weeks,” Fish-Peterson continues. “The construction documents will be developed in the late fall/early winter and we will be bidding the contracts for the construction of the town square in the early part of 2021, so that it can be constructed in the spring.” The ground-breaking for the library expansion Library Expansion Rendering