20 Nov 2008, Written by R. John Xerxes in politics,society

Where’s the Library Bailout Plan?

Literally, the signs appeared two years ago. Pushed into the weedy lawns, announcing, with a scowl, FOR SALE BY OWNER. Then, the curtains were drawn and the houses went dark. The occupants moved back into the hotels, apartments, backseat areas of soon-to-be-repo’d-SUVs from whence they came, while their empty homes had all their electrical outlets and copper pipes stripped by roaming bands of sledgehammer-wielding Sanford and Sons.

It’s a stupid story now. Consumer lust and banker greed led to the over-extension of credit at monstrous rates of interest and pop goes the bubble. But, there are some unintended and probably under-thought consequences of this ill-fated attempt to forge the middle class into a landed gentry with huge manor houses. Class war, indeed. Those consequences focus their death ray precision on public libraries whose financial well-being depends on the collection of property taxes.

All public libraries, in one way or another, are funded by your tax dollars. In Ohio, public libraries are funded by a portion of the state tax. Even with state money, Ohio’s libraries rely greatly on funds coming from the municipalities; funds which are almost always generated by property taxes.

What does this mean? Well, take the library where I work. It gets nearly 60% of its yearly budget from local property tax levies. While we are entering into the first year of a renewed levy (thank you voters!), the library now faces a five percent (5%) reduction in overall funds. Why? Because property sales have plummeted almost 40% in the last fiscal year. Houses which don’t sell often end up abandoned. This means that no tax is being collected on those properties until foreclosure is complete. In short, the library funds are being diminished.

As I see it, the housing crisis fallout will affect public libraries which operate with municipal funding in three general ways:

1. As staff leaves or retires, those vacant positions will not be re-filled.

2. Tightening of funding will most directly affect our library’s materials budget. You know, the money libraries spend buying books, videos, CD’s, magazines, databases, reference materials, and such? The first cut always slices through the replacements. When a book falls apart or has been dipped into a bath of coffee, libraries toss that out. Now, we will not be able to replace every item that is discarded. While most customers will not immediately notice anything has changed, over time this sort of loss can be devastating to an older or rarer collection.

3. In the last several years, our library has moved from buying expensive reference books, like Encyclopedia Britannica, to buying the expensive web-based databases of those sources. As material budgets shrink, many of the electronic databases we buy will disappear since we will not be able to afford to pay the yearly subscriptions on them. Since many of the old reference books have been discarded or are out of date, these resources will effectively disappear from local libraries.

It may appear that none of this is all that dire. In the short term, that is probably true. Though when speaking about libraries one must remember that in times of economic hardship, the services offered by libraries are in greater demand. People coming into the library might have to look harder or wait a few more minutes to speak with a librarian, who might not have the same amount of time to help them as before. Students looking to access newspaper or magazine articles may not have the same access as they once did. Or maybe the customer who is cutting corners by borrowing books and videos instead of purchasing them might have less of a selection to browse. Not to mention the increasing numbers of people coming into the library to use our computers to print out resumes or apply for jobs–the free aspect of libraries becomes all that more important. The sad reality is that libraries are beholden to the same market forces that drive people into our buildings. So when times are tough and people are trying to do more with less, so too, are the libraries they use.

Now who wants to go help me rip out some copper pipes?

R. John Xerxes is the man behind the prolific Love Bunni Press, a loose confederation of painters, artists, writers, photographers and designers who have been photocopying paper since 1988.

View all articles by R. John Xerxes.

Tags: economic collapse, libraries