You learn more at the Bedford Library

(pictures provided by Amari Roskelly)

Bedford is what we call a "bedroom community". Tends to be predominately families and a large elderly and conservative population. Watching over the "taxpayers money" is a common theme in the mid cities.

Maria, the library director set out to repurpose the old Food Lion Grocery store and double the size of the current library all while staying within the $8.5 million budget. The foundation was in great shape to handle the load of the books but the plumbing had all been stripped and needed to be replaced. Her operating budget was $200,000 with 75% of it being for books. Nothing was to touch her book money.

When the city did a survey of its citizens about what they wanted from their new library, the number one thing they wanted was a drive up book drop off but the second thing was natural lighting. Very interesting. 

Maria had the opportunity to attend a "green design" conference for libraries. What she learned was that she could save money by going "green" which would allow her to save money, especially for her book line item.

She chose not to have the building LEED certified because she didn't feel it was good use of tax payers money and didn't want to spend $40,000 on LEED when she could put it towards her bottom line. There is about a 10% increase in costs to a project by going LEED, mainly because of tracking materials.

Maria identified grant opportunities through the Obama Administration and their Department of Energy initiatives. The DOE gave the library an energy efficient formula grant. They installed a reflective white roof which provided a $20,000 reduction in energy usage.

State Energy Conservation Office (SECO) gave a $2 million grant and they put all their money in solar panels for the roof from Sun Power. 453 khW per day were produced from the the solar panels.

The library installed 150 geothermal wells that does the heating and cooling. They won't have to replace for 50 years. I'm very interested in geothermal mainly because I don't know enough about the system. They have very little glass facing west. This is a picture of the field where the geothermal wells are located. Building is prohibited on the wells but ideas of developing a park or community garden is attractive.

This is the monitor for the solar panels. She can see how many khW are being generated each day, each hour etc. Very impressive. We made our visit on a cloudy day so it was much less than on a sunny day.