Dear Councillors,

I know that the budget season has been much harder on you than on us, so I wanted to thank you for your support and attention at yesterday’s budget hearing.  If our supporters ran long, it is because we have been talking to deaf ears all over the city and were desperately hungry for someone to listen to what we have to say about what is going on at the library rather than the talking points the library gets to repeat over and over again at every meeting they hold.

As I noted in my testimony, what we need more than funding is help in advocating for the library in the city (among the patrons who are less familiar with the institution) and at the state and federal levels of government.

The benefit of her position is that President Ryan has the opportunity to meet with the mayor, you councillors, state representatives, state senators, and the governor.  When she calls, someone will pick up the phone and chances are a meeting can be set.  This is not an opportunity granted to the rest of us and she uses this opportunity not to advocate for her library, but to roll out a plan opposed by nearly every citizen of Boston.

We have asked to meet with the mayor and get no response.  We write to you and to other representatives and sometimes we get a response, but we rarely get to discuss at length what we see going on.  We submit editorials to the Boston Globe and we never hear from them again.  We feel that her portrait of the library and her plan for what the library should be is dominating the conversation when there is a wider perspective about what is happening to our library system.

They tell you that they began this process in January.  At that time, the budget loss from the city was projected to be over $1M (as presented by President Ryan at the January 19th Trustees meeting), but we did not hear of library closings.  The gap actually SHRUNK from January to February, when talk of closings first began.

They say that they are listening and tell you that there has been community input.  The “community” they speak of is one that only speaks English — no document or advertisement that they ever produce (with the exception of the Chinatown library report) is any language other than English, even though we have explicitly requested them in different languages.  This community sent in 650 e-mails, attended every one of their meetings, organized their own meetings, solicited the advice of expert, solicited the advocacy of authors, organized rallies, wrote to their officials, and wrote to the library itself.  The message was consistently one of no closings, increased advocacy, and increased funding.

We do not see this message anywhere in what is being presented in the library’s budget.  We do not see this message anywhere in their plan.  We are out here advocating for the institution that we love in the hopes that the administration will do the right thing.  Our voices are hoarse and our fingers are tired from typing and writing.  We do not know what more we can do.

We do all of this and then we attend Trustees meetings like the one on May 11th.  At this meeting, the disposition of $237,000 of unanticipated FY11 funds was discussed.  These were estate donations that had absolutely no conditions on how they could be spent in the library.  Amy Ryan did not ask the Trustees to use this money to save jobs.  She did not ask the Trustees to use the money to save branches.  She asked them to use it: “to support neighborhood outreach including youth initiatives, adult outreach, book lending initiatives, and other outreach activities and the implementation and coordination thereof”.  This statement is so vague that it could be used for absolutely anything — and they claim that the financial crisis is driving their thinking.

We donate money to the Boston Public Library Foundation because they are the one group to e-mail us.  We can not attend their $500 a plate dinners, so we get nothing in return except knowing that we supported an institution that we love.  And then we attend Trustees meetings like the one on July 21, 2009 – the first month of FY10 – and watch as the Trustees vote “to accept $20,000 from the Boston Public Library Foundation for a one-time housing supplement for Boston Public Library President Amy E. Ryan.”

We do this all as volunteers, we do this all in our spare time, we do this with our spare dollars, we do this out of love.  All we would like to see you do is to acknowledge that you are hearing what we say and help us to find solutions to these problems.  All we would like to see is someone with the power and influence that you have asking these questions.

This is not about a difference in opinion about what a library should be.  It is about accountability for one’s job and clear expectations of what that job involves.  Every library in the country is in danger, but if you visit http://www.nypl.org/ you immediately get a library-sponsored splash page urging you to write to your elected officials or donate to the library before being re-directed to the regular homepage.  I have also been forwarded many e-mails urging folks in NYC to contact their officials, e-mails which originate with the library itself.  Our library receives no such advocacy.  If you visit http://www.bpl.org, information on the budget is nowhere to be found (on the front page) and when you navigate to the information, there is no call to action from the library, just an acceptance of a devastating fate.

Unsurprisingly, if you ask the President or Trustees what they would do if the money appeared (as Councillor Arroyo did last night and others have done at the Trustees meetings) the group suddenly becomes powerless.  Pres. Ryan can recommend the closure of 4 branch libraries and the board can unanimously accept this recommendation and forward it to the mayor, but when we talk about keeping libraries open she suddenly has no power at all.  She will take credit for the accomplishments she listed yesterday and the library openings that Councillor Yancey applauded, but when it comes to actually saying whether or not she would continue to do this in the future, she is powerless.

She will say that she does not want to worry her employees and then remains silent as rumors of funding from the city, funding from external sources, and funding from the Federal government, swirl all around them.  Their hope, our hope, has been raised and crushed time and again.

This process has done one thing: it has woken us up to the incredible trouble that the library is in and the need for the people to step up and watch over this great institution.  Please help us in advocating for the library system, beginning with a vetoing of this budget, of this “plan”, again and again.  Councillor Murphy said that money could not be added to the budget by you, and we have always known that to be true.  What you can do is to continue to say no until someone with the power to save this institution finally steps up and does so.  Who will that be?  I can not say.  No one has said that they have the power to save our library.  We are governed by a group of powerless individuals, but our hope is that with pressure and with time someone will finally gain the power necessary to save this system.

Please keep saying no to this budget and when this is all over, please do not go away.  Please stay with us and help us to watch over this institution.

Best,
Brandon Abbs

Founder, People of Boston Branches

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