ST. JOHNS COUNTY, Fla. — St John’s County children will soon have a new place to play, gather, and read as construction on a new public library began on Tuesday. Officials say this will help alleviate some of the overcrowding at surrounding libraries.
“The northwest section of the county is just mushrooming. Anything north of 210, really. Our library, currently in the Julington Creek area, is the busiest branch that we have,” Debra Rhodes Gibson, Director of St. John’s County Libraries, said.
County Libraries Director Deborah Rhodes Gibson said the appeal of a library surrounded by new parks is that their findings show the same residents are utilizing both. The future facility will serve several purposes.
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“We are part of the partnership in their community center. Part of that will be for recreational purposes, gymnasium, voting, afterschool programs, summer camps,” Rhodes Gibson said.
The price tag for the Greenbriar Library and Park is $23.8 Million, according to the Library system’s Facebook page. As for the whole regional project… “I can tell you that the four regional Park projects will cost us about $122 million, that includes community centers libraries, and some of the other facilities,” St John’s County Commissioner Christian Whitehurst said.
The County commissioner told Action News Jax that this multi-million dollar project should have no impact on local property taxes. He says the money will be raised from developer impact fees, which charge real estate developers for the strain new communities will have on local resources.
“If you build 1000 homes, we know that the people who move into those thousand homes will have a certain impact on our community. These impact fees, which we’re charging the statutory maximum, helped to mitigate the impact so that our roads aren’t always over capacity, so that we have parks to accommodate children, so that we have fire stations…” Whitehurst explained.
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