Florida State University officials announced January 30 that there was no space on campus and no funds in the budget to acquire 500,000 documents—some 10.7 linear miles of shelving—currently housed in the Florida State Library in Tallahassee. Gov. Jeb Bush’s proposal to dismantle the 159-year-old State Library and cut 55 jobs to save $5.4 million would go into effect with a new state budget July 1.
FSU President T. K. Wetherell said the decision was final. “I don’t see that they have the money. I don’t see that they have a facility,” he said in the January 31 Tallahassee Democrat. “We’re not playing a game. We’re out of it.”
County and city library directors from around the state convened in Tallahassee January 30 for a “fact-finding and brainstorming” meeting to draft a list of alternatives to offer state administrators. Some directors, including Broward County’s Samuel Morrison, proposed donating a portion of their state budget to keep the library running. Interim Secretary of State Ken Detzner told the group there were five other possibilities under consideration, though he declined to elaborate.
Editorials in several state newspapers were harshly critical of Gov. Bush’s plan. The Democrat called it “brazenly bad,” while the Pensacola News Journal reckoned it was “symbolic not just of Bush’s distaste for state government, but his inability to understand the importance of many of its functions.”
“One of the important roles of the state library is to provide an interface between citizens and their government,” Marilyn Mason, chair of the Leon County Library Advisory Board, told the Democrat. “When you remove the state library, you remove the librarians that make access to that information possible; you are removing the ability of citizens to know what their governments are doing.”
Posted February 3, 2003.