New library or expansion? Go in with Southwestern Community College or go it alone? Two stories, one story, downtown, out of town? After a year of heated debate, opposing parties finally have joined together to work toward the goal of constructing a new library in the Jackson Plaza.

However, that new library is not slated to come to fruition until 2008, and no county funds are expected to be appropriated until closer to that time, said county finance officer Darlene Fox.

At a commissioners’ meeting last month, library board representative Vance Davidson denounced all sides and their behavior.

“We’ve done a lot of talking behind each other or around each other, but not to each other,” Davidson said.

Davidson said the warring parties had finally realized that cooperation was the only way to accomplish what boiled down to a shared goal — a better library.

“We’re not going to get a library built if we go in 15 different directions,” he said.

A call was issued at the December meeting for members of the packed audience who would agree to cooperate to stand. Those pledging to work together included Build Our Library Downtown leader and City Lights Bookstore owner Joyce Moore, Sylva Librarian Michael Cartwright, and Friends of the Library President Linda Young.

“Whatever it takes to build a new library,” Young said.

Jackson County’s library woes were identified nearly a decade ago when county commissioners bought the Hooper House, built in 1905 and located adjacent to the existing Sylva library on Main Street.

“They bought the Hooper House for the sole purpose of expanding the library,” said former County Commissioner Jay Denton.

The plan, created by then Waynesville-based architect Rick Lee, was to flatten the Hooper House and expand the library to encompass the house site and the two parking lots located behind the buildings. The expansion would have increased the library by 8,000 square feet. Another option was to use only the library parking lot for a $1.5 million, two-story addition.

In a capital improvement plan that was written and passed in 1999, about $4 million was allocated for a new jail, $1 million for a new recreation center and $1 million for library expansion.

If the two-story model was chosen, commissioners would have to use general funds to make up the difference. Other options included reducing the size of the project or using the original one-story plan that encompassed the Hooper House and both parking lots.

In October 1999, the Hooper House Preservation Foundation, headed by Sylva Partners in Renewal president Jay Spiro, unofficially began collecting donations to save the house. By December, commissioner Stacy Buchanan had come up with a new idea — scrap the plan to use the Hooper House property for a library altogether and build a new library at another location.

The existing library would be sold and the proceeds combined with the $1 million loan. Commissioners signed the Hooper House deed over to the Preservation Foundation, along with $50,000 to fund restoration, and put library expansion plans on hold. The $1 million was re-allocated for property acquisition for the expansion of Smoky Mountain High School.

County librarian Jeanette Newsom agreed with the move, saying that an expansion smaller than what was needed, in addition to losing the parking lot, posed problems that warranted waiting for a new, more suitable location. A new facility — one 18,500 feet in size — would cost approximately $3 million, not including property acquisition and site preparation, Lee said.

Commissioners began work on the new jail in 2000 but found that even with $4.35 million, they were coming up short. As a result, commissioners took $500,000 from the public library expansion fund to build a law-enforcement only access road and to build the jail so it could accommodate a second floor in the future. Denton recommended that once the old jail was vacated, a library could be built in its place. The old courthouse could become a complementary museum.

Now discussions have come full circle.

The Hooper House is now the Chamber of Commerce. Sheriff Jimmy Ashe has moved his offices from the old county courthouse and vacated the old jail. A museum is in the works for the old courthouse. The newest part of the old jail — the cells where inmates were held until this past summer — is slated to be torn down and the historic part of the old jail — once the Department of Motor Vehicles office — has been talked about as a home for the Genealogical Society.

And a new library site — where the Western Sizzlin’ once stood in Jackson Plaza — has been chosen, with Sylva and county commissioners poised to adopt a resolution splitting the site’s $210,000 cost.

The site selection was a sore point for library users who wanted a downtown location, but it should not have come as any surprise. The site — recommended by local architect Odell Thompson, who also served as the architect for the Hooper House renovation and now shares the House as office space with the Chamber of Commerce — is the same site architect Lee recommended in 2000.

The Plaza site, Lee said, was probably the least expensive to build on, with good site conditions, easy access and ample parking. Lee evaluated almost all of the properties that have been discussed in the past year — the current library location, the Jim Gray site, Mark Watson Park, and the old county courthouse.

And so, the library board continues on, working with a timeline that maintains the Sylva library’s status quo for the next three years, though it will hit the real estate market in 2006. The board’s fund-raising and project design committees are scheduled to be organized at a meeting at 6 p.m., Jan. 19, at the library.

In the meantime, a Web site has been launched to serve as a central location for dissemination of library information. Sponsored by county commissioners, with the assistance of Metrostat Technologies of Sylva, www.newjacksonlibrary.org will have space for all groups and committees with an interest in the library including government officials, the existing library, the Library Board and its committees, Friends of the Library and BOLD.

The library committees will have until 2007 before final recommendations are made to commissioners. The architect/engineering planning period is from July 2007 to January 2008, at which point the contract will be awarded.

Young is not concerned by the length of time between the start of fund raising and the creation of drawings that can be shown to potential donors. Work began with identification of a need — for a library and money to built it — and most likely will move to solicitation of private monies and aggressive grant writing, Young said.

“It’s going to be a lot of work for everyone concerned, and we’re not fooling ourselves about that,” she said.

The Friends recently contributed $7,500 to a fund for the new library and has started collecting local works in the hopes there will be a regional reading room in the new facility. Additional funds were raised with the first Great Smoky Mountains Bookfair.

Construction should begin in March 2008, with doors opening four months later.

“You only get one of these every 30 to 40 years so we want to make sure we do this right,” Buchanan said, during the commissioners’ meeting.