Where's the money?
a few suggestions for protecting our public libraries on this here second anniversary of Dispatch
In November, NYC mayor Eric Adams proposed a budget for fiscal year 2024 that would devastate NYC libraries. The proposed 3% cuts would cost the library systems $13.6 million this fiscal year and $20.5 million over the next three years from a budget of $400 million, a drop in the bucket of the city’s $100 billion annual budget. Meanwhile, the NYPD’s budget amounts to $5.4 billion and just keeps growing.
Readers of this newsletter know that public libraries offer more than books. They offer classes, application assistance, job skills, small business information courses. They offer cultural events, civic education, municipal identification cards. They offer internet access and tech equipment. During the pandemic, amidst shutdowns and isolation, librarians adapted to virtual services and programming to keep children and students engaged and to provide resources to patrons of all ages. After years of advocacy, the entire NYC library system abolished late fees in Spring 2022, prompting a flood of returns and reactivation of library users who no longer feared financial penalties for enjoying public goods. Brooklyn Public Library currently offers e-book loans to teenagers around the country, regardless of region, to access books that may be banned in their locality. Our libraries are our civic lifeblood.
The Mayor’s office claims these cuts will come by leaving vacant positions unfilled, not from cutting services. But all of those labor-intensive services I just listed require people! Librarianship is not a passive profession. Those vacant positions mean that services are already suffering, and librarians in each of these systems have said that they will be forced to further reduce personnel and programs to meet the cuts. Overworked and undersupported staff at public libraries are already stretched thin; Adams’ office is asking for a skeleton crew to run a public good across 200 locations serving 35 million annual visitors, which will in turn force shorter hours, reduced services, and potential building closures.
I did not grow up in New York City, so I don’t get a decisive say on the goofiest mayor rankings, but I live with a lifelong New Yorker who regularly proclaims he has never been more embarrassed by the holder of a notoriously embarrassing office: “Adams is so corny. He speaks like an AI chat bot in beta.”1 Everything out of the man’s mouth is so strange it’s distracting. That is, it’s distracting from his terrible policy decisions. As Susan Kang wrote in Jacobin in December, when this budget was first released:
Adams’s insistence that only the Central Business District needs revitalization demonstrates his disdain for New York City’s residential, noncentral neighborhoods, many of which blossomed during the pandemic. And Adams’s refusal to recognize the fundamental importance of local libraries to local neighborhoods reflects this disdain for the actual places where New Yorkers live, gather, and build communities.
Couldn’t have said it better myself! A library network is like a body. The outermost branches are the appendages. When the body experiences a trauma, like hypothermia, all the remaining energy and resources retreat to protect the vital organs. In the NYC library system, the main branches will remain open, but the satellite and neighborhood branches—the locations that serve people in their daily needs—will wither and shrink.
Those closures will have a ripple effect across education. Adams is coupling these budget cuts with the same for NYC public schools, which already rely heavily on public libraries. Sixty percent of NYC public schools lack a library media specialist and over forty percent lack any library space at all, forcing teachers to spend their own money to build classroom libraries. Public libraries relieve some of this pressure by providing collections and space for students to learn and relax. Every time I visit my Brooklyn PL neighborhood branch, there is a school group in the children’s section enjoying books, doing activities, using computers, or working with the children’s librarians. Our public libraries are our partners in learning and development. But they’re being asked to plug holes that shouldn’t have been dug.
We’re in a ripe environment for undercutting libraries. Libraries have been explicitly attacked on ideological grounds by Republicans and fascists in the United States for about 18 months (and since forever), and their opponents are only getting louder and better organized. I wrote this time last year about struggling to cut through the clouds of crap that bigot spigots were flinging our way. Republicans like Ron DeSantis are taking a leaf out of the fascist playbook and requiring books in schools to be approved by a “certificated media specialist” on the threat of a felony for violations. We knew this was coming. And here we are.
I’m not one for false equivalencies, but I want to shake off any rose-colored lenses of East Coast liberalism about our libraries being in a different or safer position. In December, there were protestors at New York Public Library trying to interfere in a Drag Storytelling Hour (a classic ploy), and while their vitriol was drowned out by waves of support, anti-library sentiment emerges in other ways. The decision-makers in a Democratic city in New York might not be spouting ideological drivel that endangers the lives of public educators, but they can still implement systematic change that endangers their livelihoods.
Adams’ budget cuts amount to this kind of attack: a structural weakening that communicates his office’s priorities. He ran for mayor on a police agenda, and he’s enacting it. He sees New York City as safe and prospering only when it is surveilled. We know New York City (any city! Any place!) is safe when we provide vibrant community spaces for people to learn, connect, find jobs, complete education, and pursue meaningful contributions to society. Public libraries are central to achieving that.
check out the state of your public library
Before I rattle off a few things to do if you live in NYC, one thing I recommend regardless of where you live is to look into the state of your public library. Search your town or city library budget and ask these questions: How is it funded? How have those numbers changed year to year? Who sets the budget? Who is sitting on its board? How often does the board meet? When are the next board elections? Can you run? Would you be willing to run? Are books currently up for review? Can you attend those review meetings? Who is challenging them? Why? I’ll help you out and provide a general answer to that last one so you can gird yourself for the impending headache:
Every year, the American Library Association reports on the top 10 most challenged books in public and school libraries, and every year, the plurality of bans come from parents and patrons, not librarians and students. If you’re in an area that has seen endless attacks on librarians in the last year (which, at this point, is about half the country), you might already be aware of who you’re up against, and they are scary.
Librarians are fighting back, and they need our help. Opposing militant reactionaries who harass and abuse to get their policy changes feels like a losing battle because reason and facts cannot penetrate lunacy. But if you are an adult—particularly if you are a parent—those fanatics gutting your and your kids’ libraries are your peers. There’s a reason that the protest against Drag Story Hour in NYC was squashed so quickly: there’s strength in numbers. Relocate your Wine Mom Wednesdays or your Craft Crew to the library board meeting. Go axe throwing afterwards to release your rage. Make civic engagement social engagement. The best thing you can do is show up.
if you live in NYC, here are a few specific ways you can help combat these bull budget cuts
First: Register for a library card! You can register for a library card if you are 13 or older and live, work, attend school, or pay property taxes in New York State. Register for the following boroughs (and you are not limited to the borough where you live. You can have both BPL and NYPL cards, for example):
Once you register for your library card, use it! It doesn’t matter that the hold list for a book you want is 200 people long. Look at your To Read list and request some books that were published a few years ago and read those in the meantime. You’ll be okay!!
Second: Write your City Councillor and tell them you oppose these budget cuts. Thankfully, City Council has a history of backing libraries and Councillors are already speaking out against these cuts. You can help by encouraging your representatives to stand against this proposal. Explain what the library means to you. It can be short, and ask them to represent your interests in opposing these cuts. This handy map will tell you who your Council Member is.
Here is what I wrote to my council member:
I'm a resident of your district and I am writing with deep concern for the public library budget cuts proposed by Mayor Adams's office. These budget cuts - $13.6 million in the next fiscal year and another $20.5 million over the following three fiscal years - will devastate the libraries' ability to successfully serve New Yorkers. Libraries do not just offer books. They offer classes, application assistance, job skills, small business information courses, cultural events, civic education, and more. They serve people of all ages and they provide crucial social connections, which have proven all the more important during prolonged periods of isolation that we've all experienced during the pandemic.
As book bans have risen around the country, New York's libraries have also continued to support freedom of information and literacy by providing teenagers and children access to e-books regardless of where they reside. Our libraries are a cornerstone of our civic health.
I am furious with Mayor Adams's callous dismissal of these critical services. These cuts will force hundreds of layoffs that will render many of these services inconceivable. Please do everything in your power to oppose these cuts -- if anything, we should be funding libraries more robustly.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Third: Write to Mayor Adams and tell him his plan is bunk! Say it however you want.
The form for the mayor disappears your response into the ether and I didn’t copy & paste it but it basically said the same thing as my letter to my Council member. I channeled my rage into a strongly worded email and then I wrote this.
It’s telling that even in a city run by a Democrat, a budget deficit prompts leaders to go for the easy kill. Libraries are not profitable and they never will be. They are not meant for extracting value. They maintain access to knowledge as a public good. Their community benefits are thousandfold. But just as librarianship is not passive work, neither is protecting them. It’s time to go against your basic library instincts and get loud.
housekeeping and birdseeking
house
Happy two year anniversary to Dispatch! If you’ve been here since the beginning or this is your first time reading, thanks for supporting my writing.
What I read recently: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. My friend Jeremy leant me his copy, so I didn’t have to wait to get off the hold list at the library. I’ll probably read it again when it’s finally my turn (currently 328 of 1176!). It was an excellent book about the freights and grooves of friendship.
Also recently: The Overstory by Richard Powers, which is about trees and humans. It felt especially pertinent given the current confrontations between forest protectors and police forces in the South Atlanta forest, where a proposed police training center for urban warfare and military tactics would destroy thousands of acres of precious forest. Last week, as I was on the train to work and about 25 pages from the end of the novel, iconic New Yorker and bookish person Fran Lebowitz sat next to me and read over my shoulder for a few pages. I would describe my demeanor as panicked but cool only because I was hiding under a scarf and a mask and no one could sense I’d dissolved into full body shakes. When I got up for my stop, I turned to her and said, “I love your body of work, thank you for writing it.” She smiled (!!) and said “Thank you.” She doesn’t own a computer and will likely never read this but Fran, in an attempt to document the strange and ephemeral nature of reader experience, I noted in my book which pages you read along with me. Anyways, I think about this essay by Fran a lot.
Bird
More later.
I know it was his Sanitation Commissioner who said “The rats don’t run this city, we do,” but that was an official press release under his watch. The fact your office is addressing rats, who neither speak nor understand English, indicates that you’re scared, and the rats have already won. That said, the Department of Sanitation is my favorite municipal department. It is so hard to be a sanitation worker. It takes six months of training! You have to be able to lift those street trash cans that are 30 pounds when empty. They recently added curbside compost pickup to my street! I love sanitation workers.
"forty percent lack any library space at all, forcing teachers to spend their own money to build classroom libraries." This stat gave me involuntary chills. My school library was my haven as a very socially awkward and obsessive kiddo. I can't imagine that many children don't have access to that resource.
Bravo! Shared to my places. Keep speaking!