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Boston City Council can Veto Budget/Demand $3.6 million be added for BPL
By Anonymous on Sat, 04/10/2010 - 3:54pm
We need a majority of the Boston City Council to veto the budget and demand that at least $3.6 million be added to the budget for BPL.
Click here to find you city councilor. Click here to write you city councilor and ask her or him to veto the budget and demand at least $3.6 million more be added for BPL to save all of our BPL libraries.
There are four City Councilors at large; Felix G. Arroyo, John R. Connolly, Stephen J. Murphy, Ayanna Pressley. Write them too.
where's the reporting on the councilors???
By Anon (not verified) - 4/10/10 - 10:43 am
... Has someone - anyone?- polled the city councilors on how they intend to vote? By my count, so far, three councilors spoke yesterday at the trustees hearing and all said they're against any closings: Pressley, Arroyo and Tobin.
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Comments
9 City Councilors are on our side
9 City Councilors have already signed a letter, sent to the BPL Trustees, stating that they will not approve a budget that includes library closures. I am not sure of the list off the top of my head, but I am sure that Adam can tell us who is on it.
The nine
The Dorchester Reporter lists them.
The four who didn't: Rob Consalvo (one guess whose district he took over), Steve Murphy (says he just never signs anything), Maureen Feeney (whose district includes Lower Mills) and Bill Linehan (whose district includes Washington Village).
it's about priorities not money
by the way it's about OUR priorities and OUR Money. You fund the BPL. Menino pays less than 1/800,000ths of the taxes... YOU pay the rest. ...And a true leader would have volunteered to close his branch first.
or write tham all at once
Click here. Copy these email addresses into the BCC field and put your own email address in the To: field.
Cambridge's new $92 million library
Cambridge has a wonderful brand new main library that was opened in October to much fanfare after years of planning and two years or so of construction. Its a beautiful building as one would expect from $92 million. Yes, 492 million for a new library.
So how has the entire library system fared after the completion of the new building. Well, money is needed to staff the new building so the branch libraries, except the branch library in Central Square, are all closed one day a week compared to their prior schedules.
While the new building is nice with lots of meeting spaces, underground parking for 50 cars or so, space for a cafe, etc. it does nothing for the people in the neighborhoods that frequent the branch libraries to read the daily paper, catch up with friends and just generally hang out. These people do not go to them main library as it is hard to reach from many neighborhoods. To these people the nice shiny new main library has only meant a loss of service in the libraries about which they truly care, the ones in their neighborhood where they meet with friends one day less now.
The loss of branch libraries is short sighted and harmful to the people in the neighborhoods who may never venture to the monuments that are the main libraries in Boston and Cambridge. To them the branch library is much more than a place to from which to borrow books, it is a lifeline to their friends and neighbors. To take this away in return for a better main library is to take another piece of the fabric of the neighborhoods and a loss of the spirit of community.
Fight for your branch libraries now for once they are gone they are lost forever.
http://www.bluemassgroup.com/showComment.do?commen...
It's great that you feel so
It's great that you feel so passionately about this issue; it'd be nice if you took the trouble to explain the trends you note.
Cambridge's new library was paid for through the capital budget, by means of a bond issue. The staffing throughout the system comes from the operating budget, which relies directly upon annual revenues. These are two separate budgets, and two separate processes. If the building had never been constructed, the downturn, cuts in state aid, and rising employment costs (linked to health care premiums and pensions) would still have placed the staffing levels under the same amount of pressure.
You mourn the more restricted opportunities for people "to read the daily paper, catch up with friends and just generally hang out." Really? That's the essential priority of a library system - to serve as "a lifeline" to friends and neighbors? Personally, I'd far rather have a system that makes information in all of its forms freely and easily available to every member of the public.
Which is not to say that we should close the branches in Boston or Cambridge. The real cost of branch closures and limited hours is felt by children - who are not able to travel crosstown very easily on their own, whose tired parents may not be willing to haul them there at the conclusion of a long workday, and for whom barriers to access tend to exact a particularly high toll. It is absurd for Boston to pour money into its public schools, for the mayor to announce that education is a priority, and then for its simultaneously to be closing its library branches. There is nothing - nothing - more likely to raise reading scores than...reading. But many homes have not a single book on the shelf, as odd as that may seem to UHub readers. Libraries don't reach every child, or even most - but they provide the chance for parents of limited means to offer their own children the same opportunities to inquire and excel as their more affluent neighbors. The more educated and affluent a person is, the less likely they are to be deterred by distance from making a visit. So the branch closures amount to a tax on poverty, raising barriers to equality. That's genuinely worth opposing.
It's not that better facilities are coming at the expense of older branches; it's that we're failing in our most basic obligations to create an equality of educational opportunity.
Sam Allis
http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2010/04/12...
Tulsa?
Tulsa's City-County library system has 25 branches -- with fairly decent hours of operation. Much of my (self) education was courtesy of that library system.
http://www.tulsalibrary.org/about/locations.php
FWIW, the city of Boston and Tulsa County have almost the same population -- just under 600,000 (the city of Tulsa is just under 400,000). I would also note that Tulsa has suffered from much harder economic problems (for a much longer time) than Boston.
Robert Bussewitz of Jamaica
Robert Bussewitz of Jamaica Plain wrote a letter to the editor of the Globe:
IT BECOMES clearer by the day that Boston Public Library president Amy Ryan and the BPL Board of Trustees have not taken heed of the rising storm of protest from people throughout this city (“Close 4 branches, library chief says,’’ Page A1, April 8). The people have come out, and they have spoken. The message is very simply this: It is not time to talk about library closures. In fact, don’t even think about it.
It is time to think about ways to fully support the library system, every single branch and twig of it, and how to make it even more viable, and even how to expand services. Of course it will cost money. This is how to fight poverty and violence in our city, and how to strengthen our communities.
Libraries are about combating the forces of ignorance and despair. They represent the best of what we aspire to in this country, and hundreds of people have proved that by speaking out in meetings in the past month.
I know Ryan and trustees were present at one such meeting, held at the Curtis School April 6 in Jamaica Plain. I was there too. The voices were loud and unmistakable. They could hardly have been any louder. The words nevertheless fell on deaf ears.
It’s time for a new person to step in to fight for our library system, someone who can also listen.
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinio...