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Prop. 2 1/2 Maims Another Massachusetts LibraryBeginning the week of October 15, the Bridgewater (Mass.) Public Library will be open only 15 hours per week due to the halving of its operating budget. The establishment of the skeleton schedule comes hard on the heels of the narrow defeat September 8 of a $2-million override of the state’s Proposition 2 1/2 property-tax cap, passage of which would have closed the town’s FY2008 budget gap. Still, keeping the doors open at all is “a great improvement over what had been discussed a few weeks earlier,” asserted Robert Maier, executive director of the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners—the closure of the library altogether. Bridgewater Public Library’s budgetary troubles are the latest in a series of cutbacks and closures that have plagued Massachusetts communities. Maier told American Libraries that the crises stem from several fiscal factors: the tax cap, which takes a majority vote to override; the reduction of state aid to municipalities due to an ongoing economic downturn; and “what everybody faces across the country”—rising administrative costs for such necessities as pension funds and group health-care policies.
Recalling Bridgewater PL’s history as a “leader library” through its roles as a supplemental collection development center and a mentor for smaller libraries converting to integrated library systems, Maier said, “That library has done everything right. So, what went wrong?” He attributed the crisis to “the selectmen taking library users and the staff by surprise” by not cautioning that they would zero out the library budget if the override failed. The shock galvanized supporters, who bombarded selectmen with phone calls and held a candlelight vigil September 18 even as the library was sending out layoff notices to its 10 staff members and suspending borrowing privileges. “A town without a library is like a town without a soul,” lamented resident Betty Gilson, according to the September 23 Boston Globe. The final straw came when officials realized that shutting down services would necessitate paying back $200,000 that the state library commission had granted in the mid-1990s for a building expansion. Citing the phoenix-like resurrection in FY2008 of the decertified Randolph Public Library, whose service hours recently rose to 64 per week because 4,000 residents (“more than 10% of the total population of the town”) signed a petition demanding better library support, Maier predicted that determined Bridgewater residents will pull off a similar coup. Unfortunately, it won’t be in time to forestall some 40 nearby towns ending reciprocal borrowing agreements when Bridgewater’s shortened hours trigger the commissioners to decertify it early in 2008. “When public libraries are closed, it delivers that wakeup call that all of us wish wasn’t needed to that extent.” Posted October 12, 2007. |
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