No Interim Quarters In Sight for Rust Library

Loudoun County officials have yet to find a temporary home for the Rust Library, which will close soon for an 18-month renovation, and they are worried that residents might end up without a branch in Leesburg for the project's duration.

The $10 million renovation is scheduled to begin Dec. 22. The county has not been able to find a temporary space in or near Leesburg large enough to accommodate the library's 104,000 books and with enough parking to handle the hundreds of patrons who borrow books, read newspapers and use the Internet each day.

"We're having a heck of a time finding a place in Leesburg," said Douglas Henderson, the county's library director. "When you look around, there's not a whole lot of empty space."

County officials have been searching for an interim location on and off for about a year, scouring the area for empty storefronts, unoccupied offices and vacant strip mall shops with about 10,000 square feet. Although they have a few leads, nothing else has turned up. Leesburg officials are helping in the search.

The Rust branch, at 380 Old Waterford Rd., takes up 23,000 square feet and is the third-busiest of the county's seven libraries, after Ashburn and Cascades. It handles about one-fifth of the library system's circulated items. Once renovated, it will be nearly 40,000 square feet, as large as a new library in Dulles South also set to open in spring 2008.

The revitalized Rust Library will have a children's area twice as large as its current one. The teen and adult sections and the meeting area also will be expanded, and 40,000 books will be added. Also, the dated purple and green interior will get a facelift, Henderson said.

If no short-term space is found, the library's contents will be kept in storage until the project is finished.

"There's always that chance," said Sharon Hodge, project manager of the renovation. "But I'm hopeful."

If that happens, library patrons will be directed to the Purcellville and Ashburn libraries, which are closest, Henderson said.

On Tuesday afternoon at Rust, several dozen patrons browsed the shelves, sat reading at tables or worked on computers. Several described themselves as regulars, and none of those interviewed said they had heard about the temporary closure.

"It would have been a bigger deal last year, because I used to bring my son here every week for story time," said Hope Luong, 39, a Leesburg resident whose youngest son entered kindergarten this year.

Still, she said, she comes about twice a month to check out children's books, and she guessed that she would not drive to Purcellville or Ashburn if a closer location were not found.

Loudoun has a heavily used library system, Henderson said, with about 1 million visitors and 4 million books circulated last year.

The Gum Spring Library in Dulles South is a partnership between the county and Van Metre Cos., a developer that is deeding the bottom two floors of a new four-story building for the library. The library will carry about 160,000 books.