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Bedford Mayor Nixes Library OutsourcingThe mayor of Bedford, Texas, cast the deciding 4–3 vote August 28 to keep city library services run locally and decline a bid by Germantown, Maryland–based management firm Library Systems and Services. Mayor Jim Story took the action despite having voted two weeks earlier to oust three library trustees for sparring publicly with their pro-outsourcing council liaison. Story also dismissed as a false economy the fact that LSSI’s bid was $500,000 less over the course of three years than the $764,626 proposal submitted by the library staff. “I feel very humbled that [city council members] said we’re worth an extra half-million dollars,” BPL Manager Maria Redburn told American Libraries. Redburn noted that, although the vote “could have gone either way,” Mayor Story said that the deciding factor was his analysis of how LSSI would achieve fiscal efficiencies: slashing library workers’ salaries, leading—in Story’s view—to a higher employee turnover. Explaining that “the model for how we provide service” is encapsulated in two long-standing slogans: “Service with a Personal Touch” and “The Community’s Front Porch,” Redburn attributed some of Story’s reluctance to the regard in which BPL patrons hold the library’s many long-term staff members. The 1,686 Bedford residents who signed a grassroots petition opposing privatization seemed to agree with Story. The city council vote ended a fiscal and oversight crisis stretching back to the library’s one-month shutdown in 2005 after Bedford residents approved by 10 votes a property-tax rollback halfway through the fiscal year. In December 2006, pro-privatization library liaison Charles Orean declared library operations “grossly inefficient” and dared BPL officials to prove otherwise. Library management responded on several fronts, issuing a five-year business plan that addressed how it would achieve items on the wish list of patrons who participated in a series of focus groups, and documenting in July that taxpayers’ FY2006 return on investment for every $1 spent was $5.92 worth of service. “Libraries have to do a better job of showing our value [to the community],” Redburn explained, noting that she has learned in her year-and-a-half on the job that to be successful, “you’ve got to listen to the community” and devise strategies to realize patrons’ desires “with as little revenue as possible.” Characterizing LSSI as having “some very loyal, loyal employees—people who seek us out purposely to work for us,” LSSI Director of Communications Terri Armand said, “Whether Bedford chose not to go with it or not, we certainly want them to be successful as a library.” Posted August 31, 2007. |
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