PHOTO: New Queens Library President and CEO Dennis Walcott. Courtesy of William Alatriste/NY City Council
By Michael V. Cusenza
City Library presidents, advocates, and elected officials last week rallied on the steps of City Hall to call on the administration to restore public library funding to Fiscal Year 2008 levels and address a “serious maintenance crisis” at the 217 branches across the five boroughs.
The event also marked the release of “Still Overdue: New Yorkers Need More Funding for Libraries,” a report that details how last year’s one-year $43 million increase in City operating funds greatly benefited users, but finds libraries are still not meeting their full potential in fighting inequality and offering opportunities to all New Yorkers due to crumbling infrastructure and the lingering effects of $65 million in budget cuts since FY 2008.
Following last Wednesday’s rally, the Library leaders, including new Queens Library President and CEO Dennis Walcott, testified at the Preliminary Budget Hearing to outline their funding requests:
- A restoration of the $65 million cut since FY 2008, allowing libraries to increase staff, services, and programming addressing the word gap, the digital divide, etc.
- Restoring last year’s $43 million increase into the budget, as well as any other additional operating funding (Mayor Bill de Blasio has already put a portion of that funding into his Preliminary Budget for FY 2017)
- Capital investment to address the over $250 million in urgent maintenance needs
“Maintaining our 65 locations and aging infrastructure is also a short and long-term challenge for the Library,” Walcott testified. “The average community library is 61 years old. More than a third are over 50 years old. They are heavily used, and most were not constructed to accommodate the traffic that we see due to the growth in demand for our services. Additionally, the vast majority of libraries are poorly configured to meet the demands of the digital age – with too few electrical outlets, too little space for classes, group work, or space for individuals working on laptop computers. Our challenge is to modernize our facilities, maintain our critical infrastructure and to expand our public spaces in order to thrive in the 21st Century.”
And, employing a twist on a quote made famous by Spider-Man, Walcott noted that “with greater hours, comes greater responsibility.”
“We are tasked not only with maintaining the excellence and quality of our programs, but we must also provide more opportunities to the people who have been without weekend programs in their neighborhoods for almost a decade,” he continued. “When we are asked to do more with less, we deliver. When the City needed a reliable partner to advance key initiatives such as IDNYC, UPK or the New Americans Corner, we successfully took the challenge.
“Though we did not receive the full $65 million restoration that we advocated for last year, we nevertheless found a way to deliver six-day service and increase our programming for this year. In order to lock in the gains we have all worked so hard to achieve, I urge the City Council to work with the Mayor to baseline the operating funds of New York City’s three library systems at our current funding level. Additionally, I urge the City Council and the Mayor to work together to provide the three library systems the additional $22 million to restore and baseline the full $65 million needed to deliver the programming, materials, hours and services necessary for essential library service across the City.”
michael@theforumnewsgroup.com
