The five-month hiatus of operations at Bremerton’s downtown Kitsap Regional Library branch has ended as the installation of a new HVAC system among other updates allowed the branch to reopen Dec. 11.

The KRL building, known also as the Martin Luther King Jr. branch, has been a significant part of the city’s downtown since it was constructed in 1938. The building, operated by KRL and owned by the city, had been renovated as recently as 2007 and 2019, but it had been closed again since July in order to address roughly $500,000 in upgrades, namely to the building’s heating, ventilation and cooling systems.

“This past year, our furnace broke down,” branch and public services support manager Lisa Lechuga said. “So we didn’t have heat after March, and so this whole HVAC system was in the works.”

The upgrade was acknowledged by library officials as a much-needed solution to the problems with maintaining a comfortable in-building temperature. The branch would often experience several unscheduled closures in any given year due to extreme weather—temperatures that were too hot or too cold to continue daily operations.

Lechuga hopes those closures and the efforts staff had to take to minimize them stay in the past. “It’s good cause we can be a warming center and a cooling center now for the community, which is really important, especially here in downtown Bremerton,” she said. “We have a lot of unsheltered patrons that could really benefit from less closing.”

The branch’s reopening is good news not just for its everyday patrons, but for the homeless that use its other services. The inability to use the branch’s bathrooms ignited a hot-button debate over the summer between the city and its residents in providing an alternative hygiene solution in the midst of this year’s homeless crisis.

“We are one of the only public restrooms around here,” Lechuga said. “We also have charging stations that are part of our infrastructure. We have public computers with no restrictions on how to use them, which is different from other nonprofits in the area.”

In addition to the HVAC upgrade, the library improved the building’s network cabling, and the facilities team is working to install new signage.

“A lot of investment has been given to this building,” Lechuga said. “This is a special building, our first library branch. It means a lot to the people in the community here.”