The Silver Spring Penguin

Grab some paper and crayons. The county wants public input on designs for downtown’s new library, the director of Silver Spring’s regional center announced Monday.

Three meetings this fall will examine how best to work the patchwork plot along Fenton Street between Wayne Avenue and Bonifant Street, Gary Stith told Silver Spring’s citizens advisory board at its monthly meeting.

“We’re shooting to do better than Rockville,” Stith (above) said. That library threw open its doors in 2007.

The meetings — scheduled for Sep 23, Oct 7 and Oct 21 — will not focus on specific library programs or collections, though recommendations gathered at public meetings over the summer will direct how the library building is designed, Stith explained. Holler at the libraries department’s website if you’ve got programming ideas to get off your chest, he suggested.

Instead, the first meeting (which goes down at the Round House Education Center on Wayne Avenue) considers the building’s orientation and the site’s physical constraints, including zoning rules that impact the project’s height. The maximum building height along Fenton Street’s west side is 60 feet, though heights can reach 110 feet towards Georgia Avenue for buildings that throw in workforce housing.

In addition to the library, the 60,000 square-foot site must accommodate housing, retail space, an art gallery and possibly the Purple Line mass-transit project. According to Stith, lumping those elements into one big project has been suggested. But MoCo exec Ike Leggett would rather roll with smaller, separate projects to expedite the regulatory-review process, Stith explained.

The next two meetings get into the nitty gritty of how the building will look, as well as how it will accommodate the extra computers, coffee bar and whatever else the public has suggested. Those two meetings go down at the Long Branch Community Center, the only joint big enough to accommodate architects and their freehand drawings, Stith said.

A schlep to Long Branch wasn’t cool with Becky Reeve, with the Friends of the Silver Spring Library. “I think it’s a barrier to access,” she told the board. The school-night scheduling also could be a problem for people with kids, she added.

On top of that, the meeting scheduled for Oct 7 coincides with a televised debate between presidential candidates John McCain (R) and Barack Obama (D). That slugfest starts at 9:00 p.m., around the time the library meeting lets out. However, regional director Stith said meeting organizers would try to get everyone home in time for the show.

The meeting schedule also has been shmeared with two-week intervals between each. That way, ideas have the opportunity to sink into the designs, Stith said. The two-week breaks address complaints that design meetings for the Silver Place project were too intensive, Stith added. Those meetings, which determined the size and shape of a mixed-use project on Georgia Avenue at Spring Street, went down over four days in June.

Photo: Gary Stith, director of Silver Spring’s regional center, broke it down for the citizens advisory board Monday night in Lyttonsville. Credit: J. Deseo/SSP.