Isle of Wight County Schools is on board with plans to build a new Windsor library adjacent to the Windsor Town Center.

Isle of Wight County had allocated $350,000 in its 2020-21 capital improvements budget to add a manager’s office, bathrooms and an upstairs meeting space and storage to the existing Duke Street library but in 2022 rejected bids ranging from $627,000 to just under $753,000 for the work.

In August, county Public Works Director Tony Wilson told county supervisors that the latest low bid was $807,000, or $180,00 higher than the low bid two years ago, and recommended that the supervisors scrap the expansion and instead build a new library adjacent to the Town Center.

On Oct. 8, the supervisors discussed the idea with the county’s School Board, which owns the town center and surrounding land that forms the campus of Georgie D. Tyler Middle School. Since the Town Center’s 2018 opening, IWCS has leased the facility to the town of Windsor for $1 per year.

County Administrator Randy Keaton estimated the cost of building a new library adjacent to the Town Center at $2.5 million. 

“This would provide a lot better visibility and access being on (Route) 258,” Keaton said.

“It looks like this would be a win-win,” said IWCS Superintendent Theo Cramer.

The School Board members also did not raise any objections to the proposal.

Wilson, in August, proposed a single-story 5,000- to 6,000-square-foot library. The county could offset the cost of building new by selling the old library, which was last valued at $388,700 during the county’s 2023 reassessment of property values.

Selling the old library would entail negotiating an agreement with the town of Windsor. The county owns the Duke Street library itself, but the town owns the land it occupies. It was built in 1994 by high school students enrolled in IWCS’s then-partnership with Suffolk’s P.D. Pruden Vocational Center. The assessed value of the library includes the building, its land and the adjacent county-maintained Robinson Park on the same parcel.