After a contract with Tower Construction was approved by the Johnston Town Council on Oct. 23, the clock started ticking. According to the terms of the agreement, the construction of the new Marian J. Mohr Memorial Library will be completed in 270 days.

The clearing of trees on Friday, Nov. 20 signaled the start of work at the site – land owned by the town that is bordered by Memorial Drive, adjacent to the current library building and close to the Nicholas A. Ferri Middle School.

Watching from the windows of the old building, library employees couldn’t be happier.

“Everybody’s excited to see it happening,” said Jon Anderson, the library director.

He had more good news to share with his colleagues as well, having received word from the Champlin Foundation that they will fund the $236,000 needed to expand the young adult area in the new building.

With the wheels moving, library supporters can’t help but reflect on the project, which has been a long time coming.

“We started talking about a new library in the 1990s,” Anderson said. “The building is not completely ADA compliant, and it’s way too small per capita.”

The Johnston library is one of the smallest per capita in the state, along with Bristol and Tiverton, which is considering expansion. The recommended space is one square foot per person but the current building works out to be about only 0.13 square feet.

“We started talking seriously in 1998, and the Town Council passed a resolution in 2001 saying that a new, larger library was needed,” Anderson continued.

At the time, the library was in danger of losing state funding unless it became compliant. The next couple of years were filled with consultations and architectural opinions. In 2001, architect Thomas Lonardo came on board and recommended a 30,000 square-foot building to meet the needs of the town’s residents.

The issue of funding still cast a cloud over the discussions, however.

“We had approval, but when the new administration came in, they found the town couldn’t really afford it,” Anderson said, explaining that Mayor Joseph Polisena then put the issue to the people as a referendum on the ballot. “We came up with a smaller plan that we thought the town could afford and that the voters would likely approve.”

The new plan was for a 10,000 square-foot design at a cost of $3 million. It passed by 60 percent in 2008.

That’s when Anderson really got to work. They started developing plans and a building committee that included the mayor’s Chief of Staff Robert Parker, Johnston School Department’s Director of Facilities David Cournoyer, members of the library’s board of trustees and members of the Friends of Mohr Library met to discuss plans with the architect and site engineer Eric S. Ahlborg.

Library staff members also met to give input into the interior spaces of the new building.

Members of the Friends would also like to plan an outside program area or atrium in the future, which would provide additional programming space, as well as a storage facility for book sale items.

Up to this point, programs held for larger groups had to be held offsite at the Johnston Senior Center and in local church halls. The new library will feature a large meeting room that is expected to solve this problem.

“We were forced to take some of our programs outside due to space issues, but we’ve come to like it,” Anderson said of the library’s annual Fall Festival and summer reading programs, which have been held on the grassy area behind the library in nice weather.

The new library will have a lot more “user space,” and will be a more efficient building. Anderson said the committee had considered pursuing LEED certification, but found the rigorous standards and paperwork to be cost prohibitive.

“We wanted an open design for greater visibility,” he said, adding that staffing concerns and “service points” were considered.

There will also be quiet rooms, more computer stations and the library hopes to loan laptops for use in the facility, which will have wireless Internet.

“The design as a whole will be very up-to-date, state-of-the-art, and use natural gas heat,” he said.

The collection size will not expand, but the space will be used more efficiently. Anderson is hoping to install self-check out stations, and has been researching FRD (Radio Frequency) chips to track the inventory.

“No public libraries in Rhode Island have it yet,” he said. “It could really streamline circulation.”

The group is also focusing on expanding the library’s “E-Zone” of electronic media format offerings, available through their Web site, e-books, audio-books and even films.

The library’s name will remain the same, as will the existing Garden of Meditation, located behind the building. The site will also have a 42-car parking lot, a significant expansion from the current lot. The current building has been suggested to house the Municipal Court House to save money, as the town currently rents space in a plaza on Atwood Avenue.

This week, Mike Barrette, technical services assistant for the library, was working on setting up a camera, pointing it out the window toward the site of the new library, to hook up to the library’s Web site.

A fence will soon be erected around the site, before the foundation is poured for the two-story walkout. Changes will also be made to the traffic pattern on Memorial Avenue, from which the entrance to the library will be accessed. Two-way traffic will be opened up to the intersection of Cheryl Drive, and still one-way from Hartford Avenue up to that point.

A groundbreaking ceremony has been tentatively set for Dec. 10, with a mid-August completion date.

Residents can read progress reports on the blog at the Mohr Library Web site, www.mohrlibrary.org.