Will Bradenton’s downtown library be sold, too? Manatee County begins the process
Manatee County officials are taking a hard look at the possibility of selling and relocating downtown Bradenton’s Central Library.
The Board of County Commissioners voted Tuesday to direct county staff to begin the paperwork required to rezone the 2.3-acre property, which would allow a potential buyer to have the maximum development rights allowed in the city of Bradenton.
“If we can get the rezone, that increases the value of the property,” Commissioner Kevin Van Ostenbridge said. “I’m hoping the city of Bradenton will rezone it to the highest use so that we can get an appraisal and know whether or not it would be financially viable to sell the property and relocate or not.”
In a recent joint meeting with Bradenton leaders, board members previously expressed their interest in selling the three-story, 57,000-square-foot library and building a new one somewhere else. Officials say the proposed move is part of a plan to turn the downtown waterfront into an area with more housing and entertainment options.
“I feel like a different location might be better. It needs to be a little bigger than what we have now, and if you look at a downtown area, that’s not really the place where a library or a city hall should be, but back in the day that’s where we put them,” Commissioner Vanessa Baugh said. “I guess we didn’t really think about the water and how we could use it more efficiently for the city of Bradenton at the time.”
“We can’t move the library if we don’t know the value of that land,” added Commissioner George Kruse. “If we get it rezoned and someone offers us $30 million for the land and it only costs $20 million to rebuild, then it makes a lot of sense, but we don’t know what we don’t know. It’s in our best interest to determine what makes the best sense.”
City leaders are taking a similar approach by considering the sale of Bradenton City Hall, which sits a stone’s throw away from the Central Library along the Manatee River.
“We need the highest and best use for that (library) property. It’s a little smaller than City Hall, but it’s very close,” Bradenton Mayor Gene Brown said. “If you look at what can be done with retail on the bottom with apartments on top, you’ll see that we can give density and have downtown turn into a place where people live, work and play.”
After calling for more public input and a better idea of what relocating the library might look like, Commissioner Reggie Bellamy and Commissioner Misty Servia voted against the proposal to rezone the library.
“It takes money, time and resources to pursue something that we don’t know is going to work. I’m not in favor of rezoning to predict the market,” Servia said. “It’s just not the way business is done.”
If the rezoning application is approved by Bradenton officials, the building height restriction on the property would increase from a maximum of 12 stories to 20 stories. Bradenton City Council is expected to vote on the proposal during a public meeting in the coming months.
As they debated the issue during Tuesday’s public meeting, commissioners stressed that they do not intend to shrink the county’s library system. If the property is sold, those funds would be used to build a new “state-of-the-art” library in an underserved community, they suggested.
“My vision is to build an IT-based media center in an underserved neighborhood in Manatee County,” Van Ostenbridge said.
Speaking with the Bradenton Herald, Brown said he supports moving the library from the waterfront but would prefer to see library resources remain available in the downtown area.
“I still think it’s important to keep some presence downtown because libraries are important to downtown spaces, but that building may have outlived its most useful life, in my opinion,” Brown suggested.
County officials say they plan to hold public meetings about the relocation of the library in the coming months.
This story was originally published April 19, 2022 at 5:50 AM.
