Time to Check It Out

MISSION VIEJO —  The night before the Mission Viejo library’s grand opening Saturday, Councilwoman Sherri M. Butterfield got to bed at a reasonable hour. She just couldn’t sleep.

“I woke up at 2 a.m., wide awake and all excited,” said Butterfield, who pushed for a new library years before being elected to the council in 1994. “I felt like a kid on Christmas Eve. I could hardly wait for the morning.”

More than 1,000 Mission Viejo residents turned out Saturday morning to get their first look at the gleaming, $6.8-million city library at La Paz Road and Marguerite Parkway.

What they saw was not only a state-of-the-art facility with three dozen computer terminals, community meeting rooms, a teleconferencing center and many other features but, in all probability, the city’s future civic center complex.

More than just a library building, the site has a sprawling outdoor patio and parking for more than 300 cars. Early feasibility studies on building a city hall in a corner of the property have begun, although serious discussion is about a year off.

But with the opening of the 27,650-square-foot library and an existing community center about a block away, city officials feel they have at last created a town center for Mission Viejo.

“With people starting to come here to the library, it feels like this is the center of the community,” City Manager Dan Joseph said. “I think civic centers can really give a community an identity.”

A 30-year resident of Mission Viejo, Bonnie Trussell bought her home for $38,000 when the planned community was regarded as little more than a rural outpost in the empty stretches of land between Santa Ana and San Diego.

Peeking through sliding glass doors for a glimpse of the new library, Trussell remarked that it feels like her community has matured.

Not everything about growing up has been good--Trussell said the traffic is miserable since South County’s population exploded in the late 1980s.

But overall, “this is a wonderful place to live and this library was very, very badly needed,” she said. “It looks fabulous inside.”

After a brief ribbon-cutting ceremony, the crowd slowly filtered through the front doors, shaking hands with a reception line of city officials along the way.

Inside, they trouped through a series of different rooms for reading, computer work stations and a special area for children to read and listen to stories. The main section of the library is highlighted with an arched ceiling inlaid with long slats of Alaskan white cedar. Rows of wood tables and upholstered chairs awaited the first patrons.

The library had been more than a decade in planning.

Most of the delay came in trying to convince the county to build a new branch library, then talking county supervisors into turning the library over to Mission Viejo.

In 1993, the county had the library issue on the supervisors’ meeting agenda. But days before the session, news of the Orange County bankruptcy exploded, delaying the project another two years.

Little time was wasted on Saturday dwelling on past frustrations and failures.

“The wait is over,” Butterfield told the audience. “If it had happened as quickly as I wanted, it wouldn’t be as wonderful as it is.”