City council met on Monday for a special post-audit hearing on the Boston Public Library’s FY2011 Budget. I previously posted the questions that councillor Yancey asked on our behalf.  For the most part these questions went unanswered, but written responses are supposed to be forthcoming and I will forward them when we get them.

There were many significant moments where we got important issues into the public record.  Councillor Yancey was very concerned about the lbrary’s relationship with Amazon.com, the management of the collection, and the lack of a clear figure for running the imperiled branches.  On the last point, the library finally conceded that it would take just 300K to run the 4 branches until July.  This is far from the clearly outrageous sum of over $1M the trustees gave lawmakers at a previous meeting.

We will meet with these lawmakers next week and will put the question to them on whether $300K can be found this winter. I don’t need to tell you how important the next election will be for making this happen.

Thanks to all of the councillors that attended the hearing, especially those remaining at the bitter end: Ciommo, Linehan, Pressley, Arroyo, co-chair Feeney, and chair Yancey. Both Linehan and Yancey mentioned that the hearing raised a number of additional questions for them.  The hearing is now in recess until the need to reconvene arises.

Again, the upcoming election will be important, so be educated, be engaged, engage others, vote, and get others to vote!

Next week will be the first week without the staffing the system so desparately needs. Again, please call the mayor’s hotline with every service complaint. Every call after 7pm gets logged and the city does not like to see busy logs.