Although city funding ran out at the end of June, NFPL Executive Director Betty Babanoury told American Libraries that Mayor Vince Anello came up with enough to keep the library open through July. But if nothing is done to fund it for the rest of the year, 45 full- and part-time employees will lose their jobs and Niagara Falls will lose its library. To prepare for that possibility, the board appointed at the beginning of June a “closure coordinator,” former Canisius College Library Director George Telatnik, who confessed to Babanoury that this was “the worst possible job he'd ever been assigned.”
“We really don't know anything about closing a library,” Babanoury told AL, “but we have been in touch with David Palmquist, head of the New York State Chartering Office, and he has located a storage facility in Rotterdam, New York, on a military base where we could move our local history collection intact.” The collection acquired many valuable and irreplaceable items in 2000 when the Niagara Falls Historical Society dissolved.
Meanwhile, NFPL trustees filed a lawsuit against the city in state court June 30, contending that city council had actually agreed to transfer the full $2.1 million the library requested and never lowered the dollar amount, Babanoury explained.
Library officials have scheduled a meeting with councilors July 12 to go over the budget again. “Both the council and Mayor Anello would like the library to stay open,” Babanoury said. One contingency plan proposed by Council Chairman Charles Walker is to use $1.4 million of the income from the Seneca Niagara Casino for the main library, while the city budget could fund the LaSalle branch.
Babanoury emphasized that if the library closes, it would be permanently. “But that decision has to go before the citizens of Niagara Falls as a vote because the library is in the city charter,” she added. “And I haven't run across anyone in the past six months who wants the library to close. It's been around a long time, since 1895.”
Posted July 8, 2005.