At a March 24 city council hearing, the heads of New York City’s three public library systems warned that planned budget cuts may force them to sharply curtail services, raising the possibility of reducing hours to four days a week in many branches. In addition to a 3% reduction in the FY2004 budget and a proposal by Mayor Michael Bloomberg to extract an additional $3.5 million in labor concessions, the state has threatened reducing its support to libraries by 15%.
“If both proposed city cuts are implemented along with the proposed state cut and higher levels of staff are lost than anticipated, I’m fearful that we will be forced to look at significant number of branches moving to a four-day schedule,” testified New York Public Library President Paul LeClerc.
Noting that the city’s libraries were open seven days a week, including most holidays, even during the Great Depression, Queens Borough Public Library Director Gary Strong said that 50 of the system’s 62 branches are already set to move to a 30-hour-a-week schedule, and further budget cuts would force further service reductions.
“In order to provide weekend hours in some locations, we will be forced to eliminate one or two weekdays of service in as many as half of our locations,” said Brookyn Public Library Director Ginnie Cooper, who added that the cuts would mean the loss of seven-day service at the Central Library for the first time in over a decade. She added that BPL would be forced to eliminate approximately 50 staff positions, in addition to 140 positions that have been lost already.
Posted March 31, 2003.