Officials tried to get civic leaders on board for the new downtown library design.

Their efforts, though, may have come too late in the process.

The initial design unveiled weeks ago had all the appeal of a flat tire on a rainy night. The facade facing the major thoroughfare Greene Street looked too much like the back of the building -- which, for some reason, it is.

Worse yet, the black granite monolith on the library's Ellis Street entrance was less than inviting.

OK, it was downright ugly.

To their credit, library officials did get feedback recently and went back to the drawing board, with such revisions as trading the black granite for limestone. It was enough for Historic Preservation Commission Chairman Mark Lorah to sign off on the changes.

The thing is, despite the revolt among both historians and the forward-looking Augusta Tomorrow, library officials have resisted wholesale changes due to the late date: The $22 million project is already out for bid, and must, they say, continue on to get a $2 million state grant.

They insist that the community shouldn't feel ambushed, that the project has been in the works and in the open for up to five years.

Yet, the backlash should give them a hint that they failed utterly in their obligation to bring the community along in the process. They want to blame the community for feeling ambushed, but if the community feels that way, isn't that indeed what happened?

What makes the snafu all the more remarkable is that the architects who designed the library have extensive experience in such projects -- and have acknowledged that library projects elsewhere in the South have raised similar controversies.

Hello? Should that not have told the folks involved that Job No. 1 would be to get the community's buy-in from the get-go? If major stakeholders in the library project -- including Historic Augusta Inc. and Augusta Tomorrow -- have opposed the design at the 11th hour, that's a pretty good indication their concerns and input weren't sufficiently sought out beforehand.

Library officials now feel tremendous pressure to press on, for budgetary and tactical reasons. But in truth, any deadline can be moved, and costs have risen so much just in the past couple of months that the budget may be strained anyway -- and the badly needed switch to limestone and the other revisions may also affect the bottom line.

Yet, we will live with that building for decades. It would be folly to let momentary considerations rush us into a design that fails to honor the traditional architecture that makes Augusta a jewel on the Savannah. And a library, by its very nature, should be stately -- a visual message that something very important goes on inside it.

Let's scrap this wholly uninspiring faÃade and start over. It would be far better to get this right than to get it on schedule.