Construction will begin soon on expansion of the Oconee Count Library at Wire Park in Watkinsville to create additional study space and a children’s activity room.
Toby Mayfield, Assistant Director, Regional Services at Athens Regional Library System, told the Oconee County Library Board of Trustees at its October meeting that she is finalizing plans with Oconee Construction Services, which has been awarded the contract for the $400,000 expansion.
The plans call for finishing space for study areas off the Ivy Room and for a children’s activity room near the current children’s section of the library.
At present, plans are to put down a cement slab in the entire 5,000 square feet of currently unused space to bring the floor to the same level as the current library, Mayfield said after the meeting. The library at present uses 20,000 square feet of the 25,000 square foot building.
Space not consumed by the additional study space and the children’s activity room will be used for storage. Prior to clearance of the area for construction, the 5,000 square feet of unfinished space had been used only for storage.
Mayfield said she expects construction to be completed by the end of spring at the latest and that the library will remain open throughout.
Also at the October meeting, Julie Walker, who retired on June 30 as State Librarian and Vice Chancellor for Libraries and Archives at the Georgia Public Library Service, introduced herself as the new interim executive director of the Athens Regional Library System, replacing Beth McIntyre.
Construction Update
Mayfield made a quick comment on construction plans during her report to the Board at the Oct. 20 meet at the Bogart Library.
“I’ve continued working with the FAC for construction for Watkinsville to finish that unfinished space,” she said, referring to a Final Acceptance Certificate. “So that is rocking and rolling.”
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| Mayfield 10/20/2026 |
“Oconee Construction was awarded that contract,” she said. “So hopefully we'll start seeing some things move along.” Oconee Construction Services is based in Watkinsville, with Bryan Vill, head of Preconstruction and Business Development, leading the project, according to Mayfield.
Later in the Oct. 20 meeting, in response to a question from Board Member Laura Moore, Mayfield said the $400,000 contract with Oconee Construction does not cover some things she would like to see included if additional funding can be found.
As an example, she said, “There is a column that's going to be in the children's activity room that we're trying to beautify because we can't take it down structurally. So being able to...make it look nicer and things like that” is the goal.
Later in the meeting, in response to another question from Moore on the schedule for the project, Mayfield said she expected to hear back from Oconee Construction “in the next week or so, because they were going over the plans and working with the architects.”
“Right now, it's still just an empty room,” she said, “It looks just like it did the last time you were in.”
Additional Details
In telephone conversations on Oct. 26 and Oct. 28, Mayfield said the Library Building consists of 25,000 square feet of space, and “right now we have 5,000 square feet of unfinished space that were not completed in Phase 1.”
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| Unfinished Space 10/27/2026 |
The Library opened in the converted industrial building in Wire Park in early 2024. Walker was the featured speaker at the Grand Opening ceremony.
The state contributed $3.3 million to the new facility, Oconee County contributed $1.3 million, and the City of Watkinsville contributed $60,000. Mayfield said the $400,000 to be used for the expansion into the unfinished 5,000 square feet is left over from those funds.
“Our two major complaints from patrons,” Mayfield said, “is they would like more study space. We always knew it was going to be a challenge with the building being long and narrow.”
“And the second thing we hear a lot is that the children are too loud,” she said.
“Right now the idea is to add some study spaces off of the Ivy Room,” she said. “And then to add a room off of the children’s area to become a children’s activity room so that they have a place to go and be ruckus.”
She said children’s programming also would be done in that room.
If the Library has additional funding, it will be invested in “way finding, with signage just to make it a little easier for people to find such things as the book drop, the restrooms, and things like that.”
Access Points To New Areas
The doorway to the new study space will be off the Ivy Room, she said, and the doorway to the children’s activity room will be between the current children’s area and the current study rooms.
Mayfield said the plan is to have most of the noisy construction done in the hours when the library isn’t open.
The Ivy Room is the repository county for county historical and genealogical materials.
At present the library’s two meetings rooms are closed because they are being used to store materials that were in the unfinished space.
“We had to clean out the unfinished space,” Mayfield said, so Oconee Construction Services is “able to come to do what they need to do and be able to start right away.”
That unfinished space currently has a gravel strip for underground utilities running through it from when the building that is now a library was used for industrial purposes. The plan is to pave over those gravel areas.
Some storage space will be available once the new study and children’s areas are created, Mayfield said.
Mayfield said all of the plans are tentative until final details are worked out with Oconee Construction.
Director’s Report
Walker, in her report to the Board, said “Until June 30th, I was the State Librarian and Vice Chancellor for Libraries and Archives at the Georgia Public Library Service.”
Walker said she “was very pleased to be able to step in and help the library system through this time of transition in the search for a new executive director.”
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| Walker (Left) 10/20/2026 With Lorrie Swanson, Athens Regional Library System |
Walker said she had worked at the Athens Regional Library System prior to her move to the position of state librarian.
“So this is totally full circle for me now,” she said.
‘It has absolutely been an honor for me...to help in any way that I can while I'm here for these few months,” she said, adding that she is “working with the trustees, as they begin the search for a new director. They've got a great plan.”
“The position is advertised currently, will be advertised through the end of this month,” she said. “Applications are coming in, and they've got all of their steps planned along the way, including talking with staff to get their input as far as what they'd like to see in an executive director.”
Walker said after the meeting that this was the first time that the Oconee County Library Board had been informed that she had stepped in to replace Beth McIntyre, who became executive director of the Athens Regional Library System in March of 2025.
The job posting on the regional library system website says the application deadline for a replacement for McIntyre is until the job is filled, that eight years of administrative experience in a public library is required, as is a master’s degree in Library/Information Science from an American Library Association-accredited institution.
More Details From Walker
In a telephone conversation on Oct. 27, Walker said that “at the beginning of September the Athens Regional Board reached out and said that they had decided to make a change and would I be willing to step in and kind of guide them through this transition and through a search for a new director.”
Oconee County has three members on the Regional Library Board of Trustees, Oconee Library Board Chair Daphne Norton, Board Secretary Fred Lutz, and Board Vice Chair Kelly Hansford. Hansford was elected to serve on the regional Board at the Oct. 20 meeting.
“It’s my hometown library, and where I started, so I was happy to help out a little bit,” Walker said in the Oct. 27 telephone conversation.
“I was not involved in” the decision of the Board regarding McIntyre, she said. “But there were a series of meeting and conversations. I came in at the very end when they already had made a decision.”
Walker is allowed to work 49 percent time across a month by the regulations of the Teachers Retirement System (TRS) of Georgia, to which she contributed throughout her 44-year career.
She could be permitted to work three months full-time, Walker said, and “if they need me to do that for a month or two, I’m open to it.”
The posting for the new executive direction was first advertised on Oct. 1, she said, and the plan is to start interviews at the beginning of November.
“If things go well,” she said, “I think they could have somebody by Jan. 1.”
Walker said the Oct. 20 Oconee County Library Board meeting was the first one “that this news had broken. Everybody is finding out this month.”
Video
The video below is of the entire Oct. 20 meeting of the Oconee County Library Board of Trustees at the Bogart Library.
Mayfield made her initial comments about the construction plans at 11:49 in the video. She made additional comments on the project at 22:46 and 25:48.
Walker made her report at 13:17 in the video.
The second video below is from video I shot when I visited the Oconee County Library on Oct. 27. Oconee County Library Branch Manager James Mitchell gave me a tour focused on the unfinished space.
I had not intended to make a video of the tour. I turned on my camera so I could take notes of my conversation with James and to get a few still image frames.
When I uploaded the video, however, I thought this primitive set of clips and recorded conversation would help illustrate might be of some interested.
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