Ald. Gene Schulter (47th) said he was disappointed after meeting with Chicago department heads to discuss the status of a long-awaited study on the physical condition of the Sulzer Regional Library.
Schulter met with Dempsey, her First Deputy Commissioner Karen Danczak Lyons and Eileen Carey, executive director of the Public Building Commission of Chicago (PBC), the agency that manages public construction projects. Both Dempsey and Carey have repeatedly refused the requests of citizens, Sulzer staffers, and Schulter himself, to release the feasability study.
Dempsey acknowledged that the Sulzer facility had problems and acknowledged that she had read the study, which was completed in March of this year. But she said the report is only “preliminary” and declined to elaborate on its findings.
Carey concurred and promised to commission a new report, which she said would take eight or nine more weeks to complete. She also refused to comment on the findings of the first report or why a completely new one was needed.
In a statement released Sept. 14, Schulter expressed “disappointment that [the study] is not being released to either himself or the community” after repeated requests to both department heads.
The alderman cited years-old complaints about leaking, flooding, cracked ceilings and walls, mold and other forms of water damage in the building.
The city’s Department of General Services (DGS) has already begun some repairs in the library basement. DGS workmen arrived Wednesday, Sept. 5—coincidentally the same day Inside reported the mold problem on the front page—and began “tearing the place to pieces,” replastering and repainting mold-and water-damaged areas. “They’ve been working overtime,” a staffer said.
The workers removed drywall and insulation and “tore out the wall down to the bare concrete,” sources said, revealing water—even though the last rain had occurred the previous week—in addition to mold and even mushrooms.
The source expressed relief that the black mold that had lurked in several basement rooms had finally been eradicated, at least for the time being. “My sinuses kill me when I’m down there,” the source said. “Some of us had to breathe that all day long.”
Mold is considered such a serious health threat that entire buildings have been shut down because of mold contamination.
Despite the relief, the anonymous source quipped, “It’ll last just as long as it doesn’t rain,” alluding to the fact that the source of the leakage—likely in the building’s roof and gutters—still hasn’t been fixed.
The basement at Sulzer houses the library’s technical services division, where books are processed for shelving; the sorting room, where three to four library pages work at a time; the audio-visual department office; the library switchboard; and the staff lounge, the source said. Notably, the basement also houses DGS engineers.
“It was General Services that got fed up and spent their own money and fixed those walls,” the source said.
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