REGINA – The long-discussed Regina Central Library renewal took an important next step towards becoming reality Tuesday.
At a meeting of the Regina Public Library board, they have approved moving ahead with a Request for Qualifications process to identify a developer partner for the Central Library project.
Regina Public Library board chair Marj Gavigan confirmed the next steps in a news conference held prior to the board meeting.
“Finally after so many years we are ready to find a developer to help advance this project,” said Gavigan.
What the RFQ would entail, according to Jeff Barber, Library Director and CEO of Regina Public Library, is for developers to “let us know that they have an idea or they have a current development but most of all that they have the skills, ability and financial ability to pull this off.
“So once they’re qualified in terms of their financial ability and their qualifications and the ability to access some development site, then that actually puts you into a qualification process where then the best of those are put onto a short list of three developers who will be invited to do a request for proposals.”
The plan now is for the RFQ to be posted to Sask Tenders in early October. Once the process is done and the three developers are shortlisted, they plan to move on to the Request for Proposals process and that is expected to happen in 2026.
Many ideas have already been floated around where a new Central Library might go, with talk of perhaps building a renewed library on the current Central Library site, and also speculation about locating it in the former Hudson’s Bay location at Cornwall Centre. But nothing is decided yet about where the central library might go or what it might look like.
On what ideas they are looking for in the RFQ process, Barber said they are “very open to almost anything.”
Right said, he said, they were at the stage where “we’re looking for a developer to build a shell, which is great because that’s what developers do really well,”
“But exactly what form that shell takes, exactly where it is, exactly how it works, we’re very open to the possibility that someone will come along — (a) developer will say, ‘you know what, I can redevelop the central library property,’ or ‘I can have access to a building where we have space and all we really need to do is tailor it to library needs and add the interior design to that.’ So there are any number of options that, of course, yes, include also just a totally new building and a new site.
“So as we’ve talked about through this process, the board is still very open to all ideas that are coming forward.”
Gavigan did say one of the parameters they are looking for is that the central library be located downtown.
“So the boundaries are Broad St., Albert St., Saskatchewan Drive, Victoria Ave,” said Gavigan. “We want it in there somewhere.”
The reason why this represented an important step, Gavigan said, is because “this is probably the closest that we’ve come to being able to advance the project.”
“So, I mean, it took us some time to decide what it is that we wanted to do, what it looked like, what our vision was.
It took us some time to get financing in place through City Council, and so now this is the first step in really reaching out to developers and saying, okay, we’re ready for your ideas, we’re ready to see what you think you can build us.”
Gavigan looks forward to moving ahead with the RFQ process.
“The development community has been waiting patiently for this project and the people of Regina have been waiting patiently for this project,” said Gavigan. “We’re making progress and that feels pretty good. And it means that soon we will see construction cranes over downtown Regina. I can’t wait to see that progress.”
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