New building proposed for Duluth’s main library

The Duluth public library has been researching a major redesign, holding public meetings for the last few months to hear as many different perspectives as possible.

On Thursday night, community members heard that the 43-year old library building has so much deferred maintenance that they are looking at tearing it down and building a new one.

Carla Powers, Duluth public library manager says, “As we looked at the relative cost of renovating what we have versus raising the building and starting new, it seems more cost effective to rebuild the whole building. There would be a lot of changes that would need to be made in order to make it functional. If we were working in the current building, whereas building new, we can start from the ground up and build it with the flexibility that we need to be able to serve the community for years into the future.”

Funding for the multi-million dollar rebuild would come from a variety of local, state and possibly even federal funding.

While the full extent of the library rebuild isn’t completely firmed up, they hope construction will begin sometime later in 2024.