Public Employee Press

Black librarians back funding bill



An African American librarians group backed a bill to guarantee steady funding for New York City's public libraries after DC 37 leaders discussed the legislation at a community forum in September.

"We will be supporting this legislation," said Richard E. Ashby Jr., president of the New York Black Librarians' Caucus, addressing DC 37 Associate Director Henry Garrido and Queens Library Guild Local 1321 President John Hyslop at the forum on library funding.

Garrido and Hyslop appeared on the Sept. 19 panel at Elmhurst Hospital to discuss City Council Intro. 1050, which would set library funding at 2.5 percent of the city's property tax base. They explained how the proposed law would put an end to the harmful instability of the budget process.

For years, the Bloomberg administration has cut the budgets of the city's three library systems, raising fears of devastating cutbacks and layoffs, only to have the City Council restore funds.

However, except for this year, the restorations in the past five years have fallen millions of dollars short of the libraries' original budget requests. As a result, the systems have eliminated hundreds of jobs and been unable to address $1.5 billion in construction needs.

The dreaded budget dance

"The staff and the public are burnt out," Hyslop said, describing how year-after-year the Bloomberg cuts have created anxiety among workers and led to labor-intensive lobbying campaigns by the public and unions.

During this dreaded "budget dance," library advocates have counted on the support of City Council members like Jimmy Van Bramer and Vincent Gentile, who chair the council's committees on library issues and are spearheading the push for Intro. 1050. There's enough support in the council - 34 co-sponsoring members - for the legislation to pass, but City Council Speaker Christine Quinn has so far balked on bringing Intro. 1050 to a vote.

As they lobby for the legislation, Garrido said the union and its four locals with library workers are trying to generate public and political support by stressing the importance of public libraries in children's education and to immigrants and job seekers.

Library funding, Garrido said, has become "a tool of institutional blackmail" with budget restorations dependent on political tradeoffs. Ideally, the library "baseline funding" legislation would remove politics from the library budget process.

— Gregory N Heires