When the idea of moving the Holmen Area Library to the Holmen Square mall first surfaced last month, village officials were eager to check it out. As more details have emerged, it’s looking possible the option might be shelved.

Village President John Chapman and Village Administrator Catherine Schmidt recently met with Marvin Wanders, one of the mall owners, and discussed some proposed purchase and lease numbers.

The cost to lease 14,000 square feet of space in the mall would be roughly $3 million over 20 years, well more than the $2 million village officials have discussed paying for a new library home.

Wanders did present an option to buy the space, kind of like a condo, and Schmit said this would cost the village $1.5 million to $2 million.

One problem with the purchase option, Schmit noted, is it takes commercial property off the tax rolls. The entire mall pays about $34,000 per year now, and the space proposed for the library would take up about a third of that.

Although the mall has ample parking, there would be a separate lease for library parking space. And the village would have to pay a share of the general mall maintenance costs.

The location has pluses and minuses. On the plus side, the Holmen Square mall is roughly the geographical center of the three communities served by the Holmen Area Library — Holmen and the towns of Holland and Onalaska.

“I think the parking would be great,” said Chris McArdle Rojo, executive director of the La Crosse County Library System. “The extra traffic that would come through (from other mallgoers) ... would be another fabulous idea.”

One drawback to the Holmen Square location is pedestrian access. Holmen Middle School is just across the street, which was considered a benefit for the St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Catholic Church site, but the HMS students would have to cross a four-lane highway to get to the mall.

Also, McArdle Rojo wondered what the library would do about getting high-speed Internet access at the mall. At the existing location, the library was able to tap into the school district’s fiberoptic line, and that might not be an option at the mall.

“The only other thing we’d probably miss,” McArdle Rojo added, “is we do use the grassed areas around our facility for summer programming.”

From what he knows so far, Chapman said he would oppose buying part of the mall as a new home for the library, partly because there are too many uncertainties. “There might be a change in (mall) ownership,” he said. “You don’t know what’s going to happen in the future.”

Roxanne Reynolds, president of the Friends of the Holmen Area Library, said the group definitely would oppose a lease because members believe it would make it harder to raise money for remodeling the space if there was no ownership.

Purchasing space in the mall, on the other hand, is a more attractive option from Reynolds’ perspective.

“I didn’t think it was unreasonable. We’d have the square footage, we’d have the access and we’d have the parking,” Reynolds said. “It certainly would be a possibility. It has the basic structure that we need. It would be a blank slate.”

Discussion on the matter is expected at next week’s Holmen Village Board Finance and Personnel Committee meeting, which starts at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, June 10, at Village Hall. It also might surface surface at the full Village Board meeting, which starts at 7 p.m. Thursday, June 12.