Comment: I Love the Fancy New Doors.

We’re very pleased to have a functional, accessible automatic door! You may have noticed the increasingly frequent outages of the swing-arm door opener in the year prior to the replacement. As the only accessible entrance to this public building, it is imperative to have a functional automatic opener. Every other entry to the building requires going up or down stairs.

Because Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) accessibility was not yet part of the building code when the Library was built 25 years ago, there was no automatic opener on the doors until the early 2000’s. At that time, a swing-arm power opener was retro-fitted to the existing doors. The high volume of traffic through those front doors put years of hard use on the opener.

In the 2012 Building Evaluation, replacement of that opener was estimated to cost approximately $50,000 due to the anticipated cost of redesigning the existing vestibule area to accommodate automatic sliding doors more appropriate to the volume of use. Due to the anticipated cost, the Board of Library Trustees sidelined the project until it simply could not wait any longer. When Midwest Automatic Door submitted a proposal that used the existing door openings, it was a very pleasant surprise to have the replacement cost come in under $20,000.