Blatant Berry: Going to the Voters

The only good things to come out of this recession are the political lessons learned by librarians. They have found new strategies to survive deep budget cuts, new tactics to convince politicians and governing authorities to come up with needed funds, and, most important, new evidence of that reservoir of popular support in which we have always believed and new ways to tap into it.

The process has taught librarians how to refute the claim that public budgeting is a zero-sum game where any increase for one public service requires reductions in the budget of another. They have learned the most basic lesson of American politics, that it is still the people who call the tune and who defend libraries and can help restore lost funding.

Many librarians now know not to fear taking their case to the voters, along with new ways to win the resulting election. That has been one very effective means to attain the funding that has been blocked by politicians with other agendas and by antitax forces that fight against it. As Beth Dempsey reported in "Voters Step Up" (LJ 3/15/10, p. 62–66), 84 percent of library operating levies passed in 2009, possibly the worst year of the recession. In Ohio, where library allocations from the state government virtually disappeared, voters passed 86 percent of the library levies on the ballot. That is compelling.

And the news that keeps coming in is no less so. In Connecticut, public library financing has rarely been allowed for a popular vote. Bridgeport Public Library director Scott Hughes found an ancient law that let his budget come up for ballot. Despite a massive budget decrease, the people of Bridgeport voted to provide more than what was needed just to restore the library coffers. Hughes was chosen an LJ 2010 Mover & Shaker for his quick thinking.

Now, under new laws suggested by the Bridgeport incident and lobbied to enactment by the Connecticut Library Association, library leaders in any community in the state can go to their municipal governing board for budget restoration if the financial authority and/or other officials have slashed library dollars. Failing there, library forces can take the budget to a referenda.

The Ferguson Library, the public library of Stamford, CT, will use this new legal channel to attempt to restore the $1.2 million city officials eliminated from its budget.

In several nearby communities, budgets were saved in other ways. In Westport, CT, Director Maxine Bleiweis and some of her board used their brand of political savvy to twist arms to get full restoration of a proposed budget cut.

In Florida, an intense lobbying effort, marked by the labors of "the library guy," as one legislator labeled Paul Clark of the Wilderness Coast Public Libraries, convinced the state legislature to reinstate a $21.2 million decrease in library support.

Other strategies are working not only to tap into that legendary reservoir of public sponsorship but also to refill it. Ohio’s Columbus Metropolitan Library (CML) was named the 2010 LJ/Gale Cengage Library of the Year for the creative means by which Executive Director Pat Losinski and his team employed marketing techniques to redefine the library’s primary missions and develop a new set of services to meet them ("The Payoff of Perpetual Planning," LJ 6/15/10, p. 22–25). There were budget cuts, but public allegiance for CML is growing, and Losinski will go to the voters this November for a renewal of the CML levy. "We have $40 million on the line," he says, optimistically.

These examples barely illustrate the heightened political acumen and innovation libraries are calling upon to reposition themselves, reshape their services, and actively fight for the support they need to serve effectively in these economic hard times. These are good, strong signs that demonstrate, when coupled with the huge upsurge in library use, that libraries are very alive and very well despite cutbacks. And that reservoir of popular support is alive and well, too.