Philadelphia Weekly

On Nov. 6, Mayor Michael Nutter delivered the details of a "midyear revision of epic proportions," announcing the ways his administration is tightening the belt and, in some cases, fastening nooses.

Offsetting a five-year $1 billion budget gap "will require bold action for the balance of the fiscal year and beyond," he said.

Though several of the cuts are controversial--such as closing most of the city's public swimming pools, forgoing the Mummer's parade subsidy and postponing promised bumps to Fairmount Park after changing its governance--citizen alarm is ringing loudest around the 20 percent chop to the budget of the Free Library of Philadelphia (FLP) system.

As anyone who's remotely interested knows by now, 11 of the current FLP 54 branches will be permanently closed and Sunday hours will be eliminated from three regional libraries.

The branches to close are Durham, Eastwick, Fishtown, Fumo Family, Haddington, Holmesburg, Kingsessing, Logan, Ogontz, Queen Memorial and Wadsworth.

Though 111 positions were scheduled for elimination, after taking into consideration employees on the edge of retirement and other factors like attrition, the total number of layoffs is 71. The last official day on payroll for any of these employees will be no later than Jan. 16.

Siobhan Reardon, who just left a post as executive director of the Westchester Library System in New York to take over as president and director of the FLP this past September, talked about the logistics of the closings to American Libraries, a publication of the American Libraries Association. She said the buildings owned by the city will be turned over to the city's Department of Public Property, and that assets--including staff, technology, materials and equipment--will be shipped to nearby libraries that have enough room to handle them.

Though it's fairly obvious that libraries are good and cutting funding for them or shutting them down is, in general, bad--especially during recessions, when library use spikes and is more likely to serve as the primary source of Internet access for many families--the situation deserves to be examined in a wider context.

Unfortunately, it's not possible to calibrate how much of the brunt the library is taking vs. other expenditures that might make more fiscal and community sense because Mayor Nutter controversially shut the press out of the four-hour meeting in which he briefed City Council members on the cuts. According to The Philadelphia Inquirer, reporters were denied access and an armed security guard was posted outside the door.

We can, though, check the cuts against nationwide trends and population fluctuations. According to the American Library Association (ALA), city governments across the U.S. chiseled away at public library budgets this month.

San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders proposed temporary closings the same day as Nutter's announcement. On Nov. 5 New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced he was trimming subsidies to cultural institutions and libraries by 2.5 percent this year and 5 percent next year, which ultimately reduces open hours. Additional library budget reductions are taking place in Chicago, Washington State and Phoenix, Ariz.

The ALA released an article on Nov. 7 entitled "Branch Closings and Budget Cuts Threaten Libraries Nationwide." The story came on the heels of Nutter's announcement. While discussing the national trend, ALA President Jim Rettig called Philly's cuts "the most dramatic."

But how big is the pie to begin with? Sandy Horrocks, vice president of communications and development of the FLP, says that although no one likes the cuts, the bright side is that the 54-branch system was serving a peak population that doesn't exist anymore.

"The library system was built when there were more people in Philadelphia, so we were serving 600,000 more people when we were at this size," she says. "We'd never scaled back when the population in the city's been decreasing. So I think it's reasonable to take a look at that and decide whether you need a library system of 54 when you've got a population that has decreased."

Horrocks' sanguine outlook isn't surprising from a public relations perspective. The library is between a rock and a hard place. Even while facing crunched budgets, layoffs and closings, it still needs to convey competence. It's also walking a tightrope in regard to uproars over the criteria of closed branches. But it was the FLP that decided which libraries would close, not Nutter.

"We were told we were taking a 20 percent cut, which is equal to $8 million," Horrocks says. "We had already been cut in 2006 almost $2 million and had been running a very stretched and slim operation coming in to this particular cut. Because 97 percent of our budget is salaries and materials, we don't really have anything else to cut. So 111 positions were to be eliminated and when you do that, we can't cover 54 locations. It just isn't physically possible."

Horrocks says there were lots of factors considered during the selection process.

"Are there other community resources? Is there a school? Community center? Rec center? One of the biggest factors is how close is the nearest branch," she says. "In every case the nearest branch is less than two miles. So no branch is being closed that doesn't have another branch within two miles. Many of them are much less than that."