By Shaun Penner

GPPL

Grande Prairie Public Library working towards reopening following surprise announcement

Mar 2, 2021 | 12:58 PM

The news they will be able to reopen, when they are ready, came as quite a surprise to officials at the Grande Prairie Public Library.

On Monday, Premier Jason Kenney announced that effective immediately, libraries in Alberta would be able to reopen for in-person services at 15 per cent of fire code capacity.

Director Deb Cryderman says they were not preparing to reopen in Step 2 of the province’s phased relaunch strategy and were more planning on hopefully being able to reopen in April.

“It was a bit of a surprise for us yesterday,” said Cryderman. “We didn’t find out about us being entered into stage two of opening until the exact same time the rest of the province found out.”

Thinking they still had a month to prepare to reopen, she adds they will be working quickly, but not rushing, as they plan and prepare to reopen in a safe manner.

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“We will absolutely take our time and do that, but I don’t expect that it is going to be a really long time,” said Cryderman. “I would expect by the end of this week we will know when we will be able to reopen.

“We thought we had a month, so we need to cram about a month’s worth of work into preparing to reopen.”

In the meantime, she says curbside pickup and online services will continue as they have been following the shuttering of in-person services in late 2020.

Cryderman adds they will also likely be limiting some of their services and programming due to the 15 per cent capacity limit, and other restrictions imposed on their operations when they reopen.

“We will be picking and choosing what we are able to do and making sure what we’re providing are safe library services.”

However, she is pleased to work towards reopening the library to the public and feels they can move forward safely.