Saturday afternoon on Parking Lot 4 in downtown Santa Cruz at the affordable-housing-parking-garage-child-care-center “Library Festival” with a Brazilian-sounding band in one corner and various information and participation booths scattered about where the Antique Faire used to be, I’m sitting on a plastic folding chair near the housing info booth and reporting live in the cold breeze while dark clouds blow in overhead threatening rain.

Jayson Architects has provided several large banners with renderings of the housing tower and the new library-to-be spread around on the ground and hung up as a backdrop for photographs. As I write, Deputy City Manager Bonnie Lipscomb and four-time ex-Mayor Cynthia Mathews are posing proudly in front of a giant picture of the library’s Cynthia Mathews Community Room, the naming of which was paid for by a friend of the honoree.

As I have written ad nauseam, Mathews was the prime mover, the driving force and the field commander behind the downtown library operation, politically outmaneuvering and overpowering any and all obstacles to its construction. Now, only nine years after Measure S, the county library renovation initiative — and after the completion of every other branch in the system — this one’s almost ready for groundbreaking, currently scheduled for June.

I guess that’s when they’ll put up a fence and start demolishing the Toadal Fitness building and cutting down the beautiful liquidambar and magnolia trees maturing on this site for longer than anyone can remember. So much for “health in all policies” and the urban canopy the city claims to be protecting. A gaggle of tree-huggers are paying their respects to the doomed trees while kids blow bubbles at one booth and paste poems together at another and, most remarkably on such a chilly day, the longest line is at the ice cream booth — more ice-creamers here than tree-huggers — and various officials and volunteers are answering people’s questions and soliciting donations toward this perennially receding mirage after so many popular objections and delays and studies and consultations and commissions and campaigns to crush a pesky grassroots opposition.

Considering how cold and unspringlike it is, people seem to be having a good time, and so am I, as I recognize or am recognized by assorted friends and acquaintances circulating in this wide-open public space that might have been a town commons if Measure O had passed but will instead, if they can raise the millions still needed to finish it, be a massive block-long mixed-use erection built out to the sidewalks, part of which will be the long-awaited flagship branch of our public library.

Among the dignitaries I’ve encountered are Mayor Fred Keeley; Vivian Rogers, former president of Friends of the Library, who banished me as a dues-paying member after I wrote a column critical of this project (so much for libraries as bastions of free expression); current president of the Friends Janis O’Driscoll; former three-time Mayor and affordable-housing expert Don Lane; and current county poet laureate Nancy Miller Gomez, who tried to cajole me into pasting a cut-up poem together, but the loose paper lines kept blowing away before I could glue them down, so I was reduced to writing an original poem.

The sky is darkening, a couple of raindrops just stained these pages, so I’m about to look for shelter before the ink starts running, but I must admit this festival feels pretty festive, and while I mourn the impending massacre of the trees, it’s good to be downtown on a Saturday afternoon and to see the sidewalks alive with pedestrians even beyond the boundaries of this event. Another few years and, who knows, there may even be a building where I’m sitting, and by my sense of the lay of the land I appear to be parked smack in the middle of what could someday be the Cynthia Mathews Community Room.

Stephen Kessler’s column appears on Saturdays.