Readers of The SunBreak will have noted we have been relatively quiet on the subject of Mayor McGinn’s proposed budget for next year. (Vote for your cranky cost-saving measures here.) I simply have not been able to get my arms around the beast, outside of general outlines.
One delineation to make is that this budget crisis is a revenue problem, not a wasteful city spending problem. In 2008, the general fund budget was $925 million, last year it was $905 million, and this iteration is $888 million. Meanwhile, the city’s four main revenue streams–taxes on utilities, sales, businesses, and property–growing at six to eight percent annually in the boom years, fell off a cliff in 2009, entering negative territory.
Another bright, shining line is the difference between the general fund and the total city budget, which last totals over $3.8 billion dollars. That is, almost 80 percent of what the city spends annually lies outside the general operating budget. Instead over 200 city staff are being fired. That’s why Ken Schramm, no mayoral ally, says suck it up when it comes to parking rate increases. There ain’t no easy way out.
Still, Mayor McGinn says he welcomes fierce argument over his budget choices, and Blogging Georgetown has responded with a critique of cutting library hours and services at a time when they are needed more than ever. “The old man” has graciously allowed us to republish his broadside:
The mayoral candidate that allegedly lavished such love on South Park during the election is proposing cutting librarians from the South Park branch of the Seattle Public libraries. According to the [Seattle] Times, the budget that he submitted to the city council included cuts from SPL, including “Delridge, Fremont, International District/Chinatown, Madrona-Sally Goldmark, Montlake, New Holly, South Park and Wallingford — [which would] would lose their librarians. The buildings would be open 35 hours a week for collections, computer access and holds-pickup.”
The current trend in all libraries has been to take up a lot of the slack where other social services used to provide information services–from computers to do job searches and write resumes, on over to using the information portals to access information about government resources. With the staffing cuts in social services, this will continue to increase demand on library services.
Librarians represent the skill set to help people with research in these areas (says an article from the New York Times from last year, which gets more into the nitty gritty). Typically they also provide children and teen services, including early literacy programs for young readers.
Libraries in Seattle are a large component of civil society for the neighborhoods, as public space continues to get harder and harder to come by. So I guess we ought to reconsider McGinn’s view of himself as a neighborhoods kind of guy.
In the comments section of the post, the author elaborates on his criticism of McGinn’s decision:
Over the years, the kind of support to the community that libraries provide is not just books and information; job placement and other assistance at WSES has been cut and or eliminated. Educational programs, especially literacy programs for youth and children, are under pressure in the schools. Libraries are becoming more of a public space, because the trend of development and the idealization of private property has eliminated a lot of public space over the years. They are more accessible, and because of the decentalized nature of our library system, more responsive to the local community.
To add insult to injury, we are talking about a library that people had to twist arms to get built, and public space seems to be a particular importance to a place like South Park–lots of kids, generally isolated from the rest of the city, etc.
Hours and furloughs are one thing, but to cut parts of the staff that are cornerstones to the libraries’ increased component of our public social structure goes against all of the rhetoric that McGinn was putting out during his campaign. He talks about public space in terms of a “private” urbanist project, then undermines it as a “public” project. My beef with him is that he is fiscally far right by contemporary standards, but he demands a free ride on this as a proponent of “sustainability.”