Montgomery County will soon put out a request for proposals to redevelop the former Silver Spring Library site as part of a public-private partnership likely to include a new recreational center.
David Dise, director of the county’s Department of General Services, described the process Wednesday night during a public meeting that drew about 60 people to the Silver Spring Civic Building.
The former Silver Spring Library, at 8901 and 8907 Colesville Road, closed last March. The new Silver Spring Library opened in June at the corner of Wayne Avenue and Fenton Street.
The former library building was constructed in 1957 and includes a surface parking lot on a 2.3-acre site on the edge of the Silver Spring central business district and next to Ellsworth Urban Park.
Some of the residents at Wednesday’s meeting said their preference would be for the old library site to be folded into the park, providing a larger swath of open space for a growing downtown Silver Spring area.
“This is the opportunity to keep it as open space, as green space, to put some new tall canopy trees in there,” one resident told Dise during the meeting. “This thing is pre-ordained to be a developer’s project rather than a recreational project. That’s what it looks like and that’s what it smells like.”
But Dise said county officials have for years been guided by significant community support for a multigenerational recreation facility on the site. He also indicated that partnering with a private developer for the project could help cover the costs of building that new facility.
Gabriel Albornoz, director of the county’s Department of Recreation, said at the meeting a multigenerational facility would effectively mean a recreation center with social halls, a gym, classroom space and a weight and exercise room that “would hopefully be flexible enough that you could intertwine a lot of programmatic elements within that one space.”
As part of a partnership with a private developer, it could also mean a multifamily housing project on the site. Dise said the county still sees a need for affordable housing for seniors, despite the opening of The Bonifant affordable housing project for seniors this year next to the new Silver Spring Library.
Any redevelopment of the old library site isn’t likely to happen in the next two years, especially if the county selects a development proposal that requires rezoning the site from its current single-family home zone.
Dise said that in the interim, the used bookstore operated by the Friends of the Library in the lower level of the Wheaton Library will move to the first floor of the old Silver Spring Library this spring.
The Wheaton Library is set to be closed in March for a demolition and full rebuild project that will take 20 to 24 months.
