City still eyeing Batte Furniture building as home for future Tisdale Library

2 min read

JACKSON, Miss. (WLBT) – As the town commences taking bids to tear down the aged Charles Tisdale Library, officials are still hoping to relocate it to another setting up down the avenue.

The city a short while ago started marketing for bids to tear down and clean up the previous library property at 807 E. Northside Dr.

Meanwhile, Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba reported the town nonetheless is shifting ahead with ideas to relocate the branch to the former Batte Furniture Making at 1010 E. Northside, about two blocks away.

“We’re keeping real to our motivation. We committed a prolonged time in the past the best route we’re heading in, and absolutely sure enough, that’s the place we’re headed,” he explained.

Lumumba states that the town just wrapped up an environmental evaluation of the Batte making and has brought on an architect to “identify how it will in shape our footprint, not only for a library but also [for a] law enforcement precinct, so that we’re no lengthier in a very long-phrase rental arrangement,” he claimed.

“Our rental agreements [amount] to about a million dollars a year. And, so, we’re making an attempt to lessen our rental footprint.”

Precinct Four is located in a searching center in the 4900 block of Old Canton Highway. The city presently leases that space.

Tisdale shut in April 2017 thanks to flooding and black mould difficulties there. The Jackson/Hinds Library Program turned the creating back around to the metropolis in 2019.

Considering that then, the department has turn out to be an eyesore along the busy Northside corridor. It also has been ransacked by vagrants, with home windows getting busted out, textbooks staying strewn across the library floor and other products, like cabinets, currently being taken out. Meanwhile, the creating experienced grow to be a dumping floor for buying carts and other debris.

Batte introduced in 2019 that it would be closing just after 136 a long time in operation.

The Batte constructing was made in 1962 and is roughly 41,600 sq. ft, according to commercialcafe.com. The developing is now shown for $1,695,000.

The metropolis 1st declared it was searching at relocating the library to Batte in June 2021.

Lumumba said initiatives have been held up, in component thanks to “finances. Generating absolutely sure we’re checking the boxes to make certain that the pots of cash we’re attempting to use were qualified to do that,” he claimed. “As you know, I am a normally impatient particular person, but I have learned you have to adopt some amount of patience when you offer with the forms of authorities.”

He stated the town is scheduling to use American Rescue Program Act dollars to fund the undertaking. The precise charge of the venture was not known, with the mayor saying the city was continue to in talks with the creating homeowners on price tag.

Want a lot more WLBT information in your inbox? Simply click here to subscribe to our newsletter.