Tag Archives: seattle public library

City Council Votes to Bring Library Levy to Voters in August

The photogenic Central Library (Photo: MvB)

On April 9, the Seattle City Council voted unanimously to put a levy before city voters August 7, 2012, that would “authorize the City to levy additional taxes for up to seven years for the purpose of supporting, maintaining and improving core public library services.” The levy would assess 15 cents per $1,000 of property value–that’s an additional $52 per year for the median homeowner.

That 15 cents adds up to a projected to raise $17 million yearly, over seven years, to help the Seattle Public Library counteract the effects of four years of budget cuts: an annual week-long closure of the whole system, over half the system closed two days per week, and significant cuts to the library’s acquisition budget (“more than 13 percent since 2009,” says the library).

It even allows the city to cut the library’s budget again in 2013, by as much as an estimated $5 million. Why would the city cut-and-fund, you ask? That $5 million would be cut from general fund support for the library, allowing the city to reallocate those monies. It’s a kind of budgetary gerrymandering, creating popular, self-funding “districts” via levy (schools, parks, libraries, roads) while allowing officials to pose dramatically with general-fund hatchets.

(Adding insult to injury, the years of budget-cutting set in just as the library had completed a $290.7-million program called “Libraries for All” that, besides helping pay for the new Central Library, paid for major infrastructural upgrades: “each of the 22 branch libraries that were in the system as of 1998 [were] renovated, expanded, or replaced; and four new branch libraries were opened to the public at Delridge, International District/Chinatown, Northgate and South Park.”)

Only an illiterate grinch would be against funding for the library, especially when, quite truthfully, demand for its services are at record highs. “Libraries support our residents looking for work, students needing homework assistance, and people who cannot afford a computer,” argued Mayor McGinn yesterday, at a levy press conference. “Our libraries are educational centers in every community and gathering places for neighborhood meetings and activities.”

Practically speaking, there’s no easy way out. The move toward reliance on levies is not new, and neither is the history overwhelmingly positive. Filling general fund budgetary gaps with perpetual levies isn’t sustainable (for one thing, as the city has already discovered, revenue can fluctuated alarmingly with property values).

Secondly, using levies as nitrous oxide for the operating-budget engines is corrosive. Officials discover that things like necessary annual maintenance can be put off, until the new money comes in. That tends to make the operating budget, over time, not fully reflective of operating costs.

As with the Bridging the Gap levy and road conditions, that accumulated delay can come with a startlingly immense price tag, when you finally get around to assessing what’s needed. In the case of Seattle streets, the real cost of fixing the roads is not politically viable. And that’s that. The new normal.

You can see this malign neglect in the state of the Seattle Public Library system’s jewel, the Koolhaas-designed Central Library, which is not only too expensive for the library to clean as often as you’d like–Windex sponsorships, anyone?–but comes with extra maintenance costs that strain the library’s resources.

Ironically, some of the extra maintenance cost is because the new-ish library is so popular with tourists, and sees so much more foot traffic. But the evident wear-and-tear in a Seattle landmark is indicative of Seattle’s tendency simply to “let itself go” when money is tight–and it’s symbolic of penny-wise, pound-foolish thinking that leads to perpetual levy. It’s almost always “the price of pizza,” according to advocates–but that may be the problem.

When you look at the history and number of levies Seattle relies on, we seem to be eating more and more pizza, with no end in sight.

In Stewart O’Nan’s The Odds, the Drink is Marriage on Niagara’s Rocks

Stewart O’Nan reads from The Odds: A Love Story at the Seattle Public Downtown Library at 7 p.m.

Now, well into middle age, he’d changed shockingly little. If, as he liked to think, his greatest strength was a patient, indomitable hope, his one great shortcoming was a refusal to to accept and therefore have any shot at changing his fate, even when the inevitable was clear to him.

I don’t want to quote too much from The Odds, by Stewart O’Nan, because it’s a small book, about 180 pages, and his style isn’t the pyrotechnic kind that, in a paragraph, leaves you wide-eyed. I’d just end up giving things away. The Los Angeles Times called him “the spokesperson of the regular person,” and you can see what they were getting at, but O’Nan’s gift is to somehow, through building up the stream of life’s matters of fact, surmount them.

Here, a 50-something couple who have smashed up bankrupt in their marriage and mortgage, are embarked on a last, prodigal trip to Niagara Falls, where Art has the insane notion of going double or nothing, so to speak. His wife Marion is along for the ride, but regretfully, as this undersold recap illustrates: “Her entire life had not been a ruin. There were seasons she’d keep, years with the children, days and hours with Art, and, yes, despite the miserable end, with Karen.”

Though it begins with them on a bus, swapping the terrible, unadorned small talk of people who have lost the ability to surprise each other, O’Nan is setting out, let’s say, on a slippery wire across the falls, like a literary Philippe Petit. Small steps, small steps, and suddenly you’re in the middle, a torrent beneath you. Everything must be perfectly weighted: Art’s doggedness, Marion’s habitual light rancor and dodges, the flashbacks to where the money went, the “keeping up appearances” with Facebook boasting about seeing Heart, live.

In summary form, this has every appearance of being a book about something: “our time,” perhaps, the pissed-away end of the American Dream, but  O’Nan makes no great effort to paint Art and Marion as typical in grander ways–he insists on their uniqueness just in living as they do, in having lived as they do. They come to feel like people you might have run into on a bus, spoken with a bit to pass the time. Balanced against their casino scheme, O’Nan places the chance that they have already gotten lucky–as lucky as people get in love.

The Weekend Wrap: June 5-11

Kelly O’Brien’s Irish pub to open next week (My Ballard)
City Light to remove tall pole, lines near 12th and Stevens (Beacon Hill Blog)
New Belltown Restaurant: Henry and Oscars (belltownpeople)
2016 here we come: Capitol Hill subway dig is ready to begin (Capitol Hill Seattle)
King 5: Area businesses help keep Queen Underwood fighting (Central District News)
Stinky corpse flower blooms at UW but it won’t last long (Eastlake Ave)
Zombies Converging On Fremont For Fourth Of July (Fremont Universe)
Reward offered for information about bank robbery in Green Lake (My Green Lake)
Here we go again: one future prospect for Rick’s (Lake City Live)
Large Loud Late Night Gatherings In The Park Reported (Laurelhurst Blog)
Seattle Schools MLK sale is suddenly big news (Madison Park Blogger)
Farmer’s Market opens in new space June 18 (Magnolia Voice)
New names for Thornton Creek parks (Maple Leaf Life)
Zoo tries again to artificially inseminate elephant Chai (PhinneyWood)
Puget Sound Race for the Cure raises $1.6 million (Queen Anne View)
Rainier Beach Drug House to Be Shuttered for One Year (Rainier Valley Post)
Metro Transit seasonal service changes begin June 11 (Roosiehood)
Yesler Terrace far from being the touted ‘sustainable’ project (South Seattle Beacon)
SLU Loses 1200 jobs (The Southlake)
McDonald School triples enrollment (U District Daily)
Car prowls on the rise in Wallingford? (My Wallingford)
Blake the Milkman (Wallyhood)
Seattle Public Library seeking volunteer gardeners (Wedgwood View)
Video: 34th District Democrats’ election endorsements (West Seattle Blog)
Saving the libraries: Petition drive begins; legislators’ letter (White Center Now)