On Monday, at the latest city council meeting, a motion was passed for council to endorse the new library, a multi-use facility, which is slated to have a total area of 73,000 square feet. The motion directs the project team to proceed with the redesign of the facility based on the project budget of $65,000,000 while also changing the project scope to add a parkade of around 115 stalls. and a retention building area of 12,000 square feet.

The motion was approved by a unanimous vote.

The council received a presentation by Colliers Project Leaders on early estimates of what the budget and facility will look like. According to the motion that was passed, the building will have approximately 53,000 square feet for the library component and 20,000 square feet for the atrium and multi-use part of the building.

Here is how the new budget figures out:

SpendingScreenshot of the presentation to city council at the meeting. Stats provided by Colliers and the City of Airdrie.

With this being said, it's going to take some time to get everything figured out, so a new timeline was brought forward and here is what it looks like.

With the council passing the motion on the 19th, the project team is now working on the redesign. What they come up with will be presented to council in March of 2023 and if all is well, construction will start in October 2023 and end in June 2025.

Before the motion was passed, Airdrie Mayor Peter Brown expressed how he was having a hard time understanding why there needed to be such large changes to the budget and the building.

"I called three reputable firms, and they were significantly less, more than half to do the same work. Going forward, I'm trying to understand how I'm going to trust these numbers going forward."

Brown finished off by asking Colliers for a copy of all the costs that were used for these estimates on materials that were used to come up with these numbers so he can review them.

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