Flagler County Library’s $14 Million South Branch ‘Nexus Center’ Breaks Ground in August, Ending 10-Year Wait

Almost a decade after Holly Albanese and the Library Board of Trustees first conceived it, the south branch of the Flagler County Library–to be called the Nexus Center–will break ground on Aug. 5 on the 7-acre parcel opposite the Flagler County Sheriff’s Operations Center, a short walk down from the future Bunnell City Hall now under construction.

The 23,000-square-foot, one-floor library, combined with the county’s social services offices, will open at the end of October 2025, and will have an enormous community rom that can seat 325 people, and can be subdivided: during the week, it’ll also be the site of the county’s congregate meals, an operation run by the Department of Health and Human Services.




The Flagler County Commission approved the $14.4 million construction contract with Ajax Building Company Monday evening.

“It’s been nine long years for me, just on that project, to get this facility built,” Albanese, the library director and assistant county administrator, said today. “I’m elated, relieved and looking forward to the future. This will be a great community resource. I’m proud of the work we’ve accomplished, and that we’ve brought over $6 million to the project.”

Two library Board of Trustees members have been on the board the entire nine years: Sharon Atack and Jim Ulsamer, who chairs the board and has been a vocal, sometimes more than insistent–and occasionally exasperated–advocate of the new library, which tended to get passed by the county’s bean counters year after year.

As a symbolic gesture, Albanese told members of her board that at the groundbreaking, she will be using the shovel from the 1998 groundbreaking of the Palm Coast library on Palm Coast Parkway. The shovel was used by the library director at the time, Doug Cisney, for whom the elegant, glassed-in room at the Palm Coast library is named. “Upon my retirement, I too will pass the shovel down to the next library director in hopes that they will be successful in any future endeavors of library services for Flagler County,” Albanese said.




The 1998 occasion was described with a similar sense of unreality by Carl Laundrie, who headed the News-Journal’s Flagler bureau at the time, and who would go on to be a president of the Friends of the Library many years later. “Monday was a day that seemed impossible to the Friends of the Library five years ago, but occasionally dreams do come true and Monday the Friends broke ground for a new public library for Flagler County,” Laundrie wrote in the Oct. 20, 1998 edition of the paper.

The cost of the 30,000 square foot library? $2.1 million. (In inflation-adjusted dollars, that comes to $4 million today, nowhere near the $16 million for the smaller branch library.) The county had borrowed $1.7 million from NationsBank at the time, with a $400,000 state grant. The library had outgrown its 5,600 square foot space at what used to be the Palm Harbor Shopping Center, what today is known as Island Walk.

Plans for a south branch library started in 2014. The county hired a construction manager in June 2022. The project got an $800,000 disaster-recovery grant, a $500,00 state aid grant, and a $4 million grant through the state Department of Commerce, part of the federal broadband initiative. Added to existing funds that have been accumulating (revenue from the library’s passport fund, impact fees, and $9.15 million from the general fund), that totaled over $16 million.




The tilt-panel walls will have a metal roof, with a community meeting room and a catering-ready kitchen, an office for the county’s Human Health Services department, and parking for 125 vehicles, including turf parking. The structure will withstand 150 miles per hour winds. It won;t be a public shelter during emergencies, but it will be a staging ground for first responders before and after emergencies.

The library will be stocked with materials from the old Bunnell Branch Library, now renting space–just 1,152 square feet–at Marvin’s Garden along State Road 100, and paying $1,500 a month in rent. The new library will eliminate that rent cost. (It cost the county an additional $12,000 to move its broadband service there.) It will also eliminate the $50,000 to $60,000 the county is paying Church ion the Rock, where Human Services has its congregate meals at the moment.

The Bunnell branch will officially be called the Fagler County Public Library at the Nexus Center. The Nexus name reflects the multi purposes of the building. It will open its doors as one of three major new institutional buildings on Commerce Parkway near he time when the Parkway will have pierced through to U.S. 1, ushering in its own series of development. In essence, the new library is part of a new center of gravity in Bunnell.

Visible construction will start on Aug. 21. Rhodes & Brito is the architectural firm. The original design was for a 32,000 square-foot facility. It was scaled down to lower costs.

“Of course to me the groundbreaking will be a celebratory day but nothing in comparison to the grand opening,” Albanese told members of the Board of Trustees.

“Thank you for getting us to this point, Holly,” Atack wrote her in an email. “It’s been one roadblock after another, but you have never given up. Can’t wait to see you with that shovel.”