Two cities are about to suffer them, barring some kind of intervention: Salinas, CA and Buffalo-Erie County, NY are both faced with financial situations that appear to make it impossible to keep their libraries open.
The situation is bad in Salinas, where the failure of two tax measures on the ballot earlier this month leaves a $10 million hole in the city budget. The result: all three of the city's public libraries will be closed, since their $3 million budget is one of the things the city simply can't afford anymore. Several possible solutions are being explored, but the circumstances are not promising.
Things may be even worse in Buffalo-Erie County, where community shock and outrage has followed the announcement that all 52 of the county's public libraries will close if a proposed county budget -- which includes an 80% cut to the library system's budget -- goes into effect. Library director Michael Mahaney says that what's left after the cuts may not even be enough to shut the libraries down in an orderly fashion, let alone to keep just one library open.
The big question -- and one that we as a society have been trying to answer for years -- is whether public libraries are valuable enough as a public good to be worth reasonable support from taxpayers. Judging by the shock and anger of people in Salinas and Buffalo, a lot of citizens are complacent in their belief that government will always find the funds to keep non-essential but highly regarded services like libraries going. These closings are a wake-up call: this could happen anywhere, an increasingly likely consequence of voting against the latest tax increase or bond issue.
Michael Kinsley published a collection of essays in the mid-90s called Big Babies. In the title piece, Kinsley takes to task all of those who think they can have their cake (low, low taxes) and eat it, too (expensive and plentiful government services):
They make flagrantly incompatible demands -- "cut my taxes, preserve my benefits, balance the budget" -- then explode in self-righteous outrage when the politicians fail to deliver. They are, in short, big babies.
I'm not saying it's unreasonable to want to pay lower taxes. I'm just saying that you have to be ready to walk the walk that comes with that -- no libraries, poor schools, less police protection, no safety net. Too many Americans seem to think that government will always manage to find a way to provide the services to which they're accustomed. As the citizens of Salinas and Buffalo are learning, that simply isn't the case.
Posted by Stacie at November 23, 2004 07:27 PM