Aurora’s Chambers Plaza Library reopened lower than three years in the past to nice fanfare after a decade-plus closure. However now the modest department on the fringe of a strip mall on East Colfax Avenue will shut once more — this time for good.
It’s one among two branches set to go darkish within the metropolis on the finish of October because the Aurora Public Library shrinks its presence from seven to 5 branches in an effort to consolidate providers throughout town of 400,000 to the places the place they’re used most. The opposite one focused to shut is the Iliff Sq. Library at South Peoria Avenue and East Iliff Avenue.
Whereas the dual closures will coincide with an enlargement of the Martin Luther King Jr. department — a couple of miles down Colfax from the Chambers Plaza Library — it’s chilly consolation for individuals who reside in and round Aurora’s Altura neighborhood.
“I like this library,” Debbie Cochran stated as she obtained able to enter the Chambers Plaza department on a latest morning.
Cochran, 75, doesn’t personal a pc. She makes use of the library’s financial institution of desktop machines to learn and ship emails.
“I’ve entry to their computer systems,” she stated. “It’s very handy.”
Ginger White Brunetti, the director of the Aurora Library and Cultural Providers Division, characterised the department closures scheduled for Oct. 24 as a “strategic enterprise choice.” Ending the leases on each the Chambers Plaza and Iliff Sq. buildings will save town $120,000 a yr.
The enlargement of the MLK department, which is being funded by a $2.5 million federal grant, will double the scale of the library to 16,500 sq. ft by activating its second ground, White Brunetti stated. Meaning extra research and assembly rooms, new expertise and “maker areas,” the place patrons can study new expertise, like utilizing a 3D printer or a stitching machine.
White Brunetti stated the 5 employees members at Chambers Plaza and Iliff Sq. might be transferred to MLK, which is scheduled to open in its new, upgraded configuration on Nov. 3.
“We thought it was higher to place our seasoned employees at MLK, which is increasing to optimize the sources we’ve,” she stated. “And people (two) branches don’t have the identical variety of visits as our different branches.”
In keeping with 2024 library information, Chambers Plaza noticed 32,098 visits and Iliff Sq. had 33,915 — the 2 least-patronized branches within the system. Hoffman Heights Library, simply southwest of the Anschutz Medical Campus, was third from the underside, with almost 50,000 visits final yr.
Aurora Public Library’s two hottest places have been Tallyn’s Attain Library, in southeast Aurora, with 182,378 visits, and the Central Library, close to town’s municipal headquarters on East Alameda Avenue, with 116,805 visits.
Checkouts of bodily supplies throughout the system have declined over the past three years — from 406,886 in 2022 to 389,218 in 2023 to 304,263 final yr. General checkout quantity stays nicely beneath its pre-pandemic degree of 613,000 gadgets in 2019. On the digital aspect, e-checkouts have fluctuated within the final six years however have typically gone up from 230,000 in 2019, peaking in 2023 at 380,000.
Aurora Metropolis Councilman Curtis Gardner expressed disappointment on the information, which town introduced earlier this month.
“I believe libraries are a core service of metropolis authorities, and they’re simply as related right now as they have been 50 years in the past,” he stated. “Whereas this choice is smart from a customer standpoint, it’s nonetheless disappointing. I hope my colleagues will prioritize funding for our libraries sooner or later to make sure we’ve a library system on par with a metropolis of our dimension.”
Neighboring Denver, with barely lower than twice the inhabitants of Aurora, has 27 library branches.
The Aurora Public Library will try to serve the neighborhoods it’s leaving with extra visits from the Bookmobile to parks and recreation facilities the place patrons can take a look at and return gadgets. The library system will even provide on-line sources and transit choices to full-service libraries within the space.
“That’s not the identical as having a brick-and-mortar library,” White Brunetti conceded. “Closing two branches will not be the path we wished to go in.”
This autumn’s consolidation isn’t the primary time Aurora has needed to shutter branches. In 2009, the system closed 4 of its seven branches through the Nice Recession — victims of the slumping financial system and a failed property-tax hike that might have stored them open.
Over the following decade and a half, they have been all resuscitated — most not too long ago with the grand reopening of Chambers Plaza Library in 2023.
Asantai Thornton, 23, stated she might be unhappy to see the Chambers Plaza department shut in two months. She lives only a couple blocks away from the library and visits it a number of instances a month.
“It’s not like there are a variety of locations the place individuals can collect,” Thornton stated, as she eyed “Directions for Dancing” by Nicola Yoon and “Love Any person” by Rachel Roasek as potential late summer time reads. “It’s a approach the place I can escape. It’s all the time so chill, it’s quiet.”
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