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| City Council members during the hearing |
Cultural Committee Chair Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer consistently schedules Citizens Defending Libraries to testify last when the once packed hearing room has emptied of press and all those who interest in the well being of libraries has departed. Posting our testimony provides a partial antidote to Mr. Van Bramer's apparent hope that Citizens Defending Libraries testimony is thus little noticed.
Video of the entire hearing is up at the Council site (we start our testimony at 5:24:00) and we will have video of our just selected testimony available soon.
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| Michael D. D. White co-founder of Citizens Defending Libraries |
Testimony of Citizens Defending Libraries
March 23, 2016
James G. Van Bramer, Chair
Committee on Cultural Affairs,
Libraries and International Intergroup Relations
Council Chambers
City Hall
New York, NY 10017
Re: Preliminary Budget Hearing - Libraries.
Dear Committee:
As we go forward into our now fourth year testifying, I think we all now know by now how all this goes:
Citizens Defending Libraries says that New York libraries should be funded to a level sufficient such that the underfunding of libraries cannot be cited as an excuse to sell and shrink libraries, libraries like the central destination Brooklyn Heights Library with its special focus on Baseness Career and Education functions or the 34th Street Science, Industry and Business Library with the consequent shrinkage of Mid-Manhattan library. . . .Our own math is simple and straightforward. It doesn’t get tangled in budget dance questions of whether we start out at zero base-line funding or 50% base-line funding: It focuses just on where we must wind up and the fact that losing valuable libraries provided to us by the sacrifice and wise investment of previous generations means suffering profound public losses.
You, the public’s representatives sitting on the City Council thereupon respond saying that you appreciate our passion for libraries and respectfully disagree with us.
Our demand is not unreasonable given that libraries are the merest fraction of the NYC budget to fund, but this is the City Council Chamber where, when citing the underfunding of libraries as an excuse to sell them at a loss:
• Councilman Brad Lander said of any higher level of funding, “We are not going to get there in the near term, honestly this decade” (essentially the entirety of the de Blasio administration if reelected), andReally? In this time of unprecedented plenty when the city is awash in surplus funds as never before?
• Councilman David Greenfield said, “the reality is that our public libraries are underfunded” and that we can’t hope that the resources for needed repairs “are going to fall from the sky.”
As New York Times columnist Jim Dwyer pointed out, in 8 years just past, at least $620 million was spent on just three sports arenas, (the Ratner/Prokhorov "Barclays" included) and that this amount was 1.37 times the amount spent on libraries serving seven times as many users.
The City Council can’t find money to prevent the sale and shrinkage of libraries, but when the Central Library Plan proposed to sell and shrink libraries (Mid-Manhattan and SIBL) in a drastic reduction of library space together with an exile of books, the City Council was supporting that plan’s expenditures of hundreds of millions of dollars of public money. When the plan (stil supported by the Council) was finally derailed, its cost was to be in excess one half billion dollars.
Further, the Comptroller delivered a letter critiquing the basic notion that the self-cannibalizing sale of libraries the Council supports, purportedly to fund other libraries, doesn’t make sense because:
"It is simply unsustainable for the City to rely solely on the disposition of property to cover capital needs without fixing the systemic causes for the capital gap."What is newly before us now are the following:
• It has been revealed that the bid of the developer (giving money to de Blasio) to whom the Brooklyn Heights Library is being handed off for a minuscule fraction of its value to the public is a low bidder for the property with a bid that is substantially inferior in other ways as well. The New York Post reported how the bid is 20% below market and 12% below one of the two other higher bids. As the BPL is only netting a very small amount selling this recently expanded and fully upgraded library for less than the value of a vacant lot, that low bid cuts down on any netting funds to a proportionately much greater degree.We must note that, except for this testimony of our Citizens Defending Libraries, no mention of any of the above surfaced at this hearing.
• The documentation, also covered by the New York Post, that the BPL, while claiming poverty as a reason to sell libraries, is sitting on more than $100 million in long unspent funds for capital repairs, essentially hiding it.
• It is not just libraries that are being plundered: De Blasio’s deputy development mayor is also raiding Department of Education funds in amounts that have not been revealed to help push through the sale of the Brooklyn Heights Library with a backroom deal unveiled at the last minute and still not publicly scrutinized.
We also suggest that you look into the latest figures on the cost of building the tiny, largely underground, mostly bookless library that is supposed, eventfully, to open in place of the once fabulous and beloved Donnell Library. Donnell was closed in the spring of 2008. You ought to discover that the NYPL is netting even less from the sale of this library than previously thought, at this point perhaps less than $20 million.
The Donnell debacle was the model for the now pending Brooklyn Heights Library transaction, and Brooklyn Public Library president Linda Johnson just months ago told the City Council in these chambers that the Heights Library transaction is, in turn, being viewed as model for transactions that all three NYC library systems are working on.
In this day and age of escalating power inequality and wealth inequality and in this city where the real estate industry is a major driver of forces in that regard, people wonder on whose side this City Council and the de Blasio administration stand. Within the last few days there was a lot going on in the Council Chambers to push through the de Blasio administration city-wide Rezoning Plans Mandatory Inclusionary Housing (MIH) and Zoning for Quality and Affordability (ZQA). These proposals were very complex, hard to understand or analyze, they were moving fast, partly a moving target. People were trying hard to catch up and fathom where the de Blasio administration and City Council priorities were: Were they with the public or the real estate industry?
The dust is settling, but what is happening with the selling off of libraries is relatively simple and straightforward and could be used a window on what overall priorities really are. Choosing to sell libraries to turn them into real estate deals that benefit the real estate industry, not the public, speaks of a priority that favors the moneyed real estate industry.
We appreciate that the City Council demonstrates its passion about funding for the libraries. What we sorely wish is that the Council’s passion extended to ensuring sufficient funding of libraries so that there would be no excuse to hand off libraries as real estate boondoggles.
Sincerely,
Michael D. D. White
Citizens Defending Libraries
ADDENDUM:
As additional testimony we refer you also to the following previously to the City Council as testimony.
In connection with the proposed ULURP proceeding asking for public input about whether public approval should be given for the proposed sale and drastic shrinkage the Brooklyn Heights Library, Brooklyn’s central destination library in Downtown Brooklyn on Cadman Plaza West at Tillary and Clinton we furnished submissions that included (among other things)
1. A Citizens Defending Libraries web page of links to articles (including key excerpts) that discuss the relative merits and disadvantages of digital versus physical books.
2. Testimonies concerning this proposed sale from members of the public collected in a brief space of time after the Borough President finished the portion of his hearing for the taking of oral testimony. We submitted well over 2,000 to the Borough President and most were collected between August 25, 2015 and September 8, 2015. Already we have many more (not here supplied). Look at the form that was filled out (a blank one is supplied herewith): Most Brooklynites and New Yorkers feel that all or almost all of these many reasons should bar the sale and shrinkage of this library, often with just a few of these reasons being sufficient reason enough. Among other things, aside from the fact that the public values its library, there is profound lack of faith in the conduct of library administration and other involved officials.
3. A print-out of our Citizens Defending Libraries petition to Mayor Bloomberg and a print-out of our Citizens Defending Libraries petition to Mayor de Blasio. Currently there are just over 16,000 electronic signatures to the petition to Mayor Bloomberg (and other officials) and well over 8,000 electronic signatures to Mayor de Blasio (and other officials). In addition, we have thousands of additional signatures that are not electronically executed because many people still do not have emails or choose not to sign the petition that way. However much heralded, the digital age has not entirely arrived. Although representative, these print-outs for submission to the Brooklyn Borough President at an earlier date were not up to date with all new signatures. Nor are we able to keep up with data entry with so many people adding their names.
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| The more than 2,000 testimonies collected by Citizens Defending Libraries for the Brooklyn Borough President's hearing and submitted also to the City Planing Commission. This image was displayed while oral testimony was given at the CPC hearing |
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| You can print this form and use it to submit testimony |
TEXT OF TESTIMONY FORM\
Here in TEXT form is a checklist of reasons you can include when you testify that you are against the sale and shrinkage of the Brooklyn Heights Library:
• The library, which I understand has a probable value of over $120 million, is being sold for absurdly little.
• The BPL has been extraordinarily non-transparent in all ways including keeping its plan to sell this library secret since 2007 (or before) and refusing to publicly disclose its "strategic real estate plan" revealing what libraries it wants to turn into real estate deals next.
• We should not be shrinking this library, especially down to just one-third size, especially since it was just enlarged and completely upgraded in 1993 at considerable public expense and sacrifice.
• It is impossible to guarantee that any proceeds from the sale (which all go to the city) would ever come back to be spent on libraries and, even if they were, the net amount is paltry, perhaps close to or even less than zero.
• The library is a sturdy beautifully designed building with space that can easily be put to good many good uses in different ways.
• The library's "Business and Career" functions should not be moved out of the Downtown Brooklyn business district, especially when it is growing.
• We should not be selling off our public infrastructure to private developers, especially educational infrastructure when, for example, our schools are not keeping pace with new development.
• It is discriminatory and anti-democratic to turn libraries into real estate boondoggles.
• I don't like that Mayor de Blasio was taking money from the development team that was chosen while their application was pending. (Developers he said were "lurking right behind the curtain . . very anxious to get their hands on these valuable properties.")
• Stuck in the bottom of a residential, privately owned building, we won't ever be able to enlarge this library to correct this shrinkage or accommodate growth.
• Selling libraries to developers "because they are underfunded"creates a perverse incentive to underfund libraries, exactly what we have witnessed.
• The library is being shrunk down to a preordained size without bothering to design a new library first or figure out how many books it should hold.
• I want lots of books in our libraries and this plan gets rid of them.
• Selling this public asset so cheaply will lead to sell-offs of our other assets including sale of more libraries.
• We can't sell off our libraries for a few so-called "affordable" housing units, especially when these units "poor door" style are insultingly far away and we are, at the same time, shedding 14,000 truly affordable NYCHA public housing units using the same tactics and excuses employed to sell libraries.
• A private school (Saint Ann's) is benefitting in a significant and undisclosed amount from the loss that the public will suffer if the library is sold and shrunk (and may even get more from the sale than the city and BPL will net).
• I don't believe the fairy tales the BPL is telling about how it `can't fix' library air conditioning. (I wouldn't sell my home for this reason!)
• No extra space will be built at the Grand Army Plaza Library to house any shift of the "Business and Career" functions to that location and there are no designs or cost estimations for how to cram those functions in.
• Library use and circulation of physical books is up dramatically and our libraries should grow and be funded to accommodate that.
• This plan is a short-sighted sacrifice of an irreplaceable asset, inexcusable for a wealthy city like ours.
• We should have learned from the Donnell Library sale debacle (that this sale is modeled on!) how terrible mistakes like this are.
• The environmental repercussions of this project have not been adequately considered and assessed.
• Civilizations that dismantle their libraries generally fail.
• ALL OF THE ABOVE!
Below is past testimony we submitted at budget City Council hearings all of which still remains relevant.
Some of our past testimony has concerned the mind-set of the library trustees. Augmenting that, we offer, for the record, a Citizens Defending Libraries page with information the BPL trustees as well as another a page about how not-for-profit boards can go of course and off-mission and the sort of mixed aganda that can conflict. See:
• Brooklyn Public Library Trustees- Identified + Biographical and Other Information Supplied
June 9, 2015
• Why Nonprofit Boards May Stray From Their Core Missions And Obligations To the Public- Considered Generally And Particularly With Respect To Libraries
James G. Van Bramer, Chair
Committee on Cultural Affairs,
Libraries and International Intergroup Relations
250 Broadway
New York, NY 10017
Re: June 8th and 9th 2015, New York City Council Fiscal Year 2016 Executive Budget Hearing- Libraries, Mayor's FY '14 Preliminary Management Report and Agency Oversight Hearings
Dear Committee:
I begin with a quote:
“It’s public land and public facilities and public value under threat. . . and once again we see, lurking right behind the curtain, real estate developers who are very anxious to get their hands on these valuable properties”That’s the mayor speaking in 2013 as a candidate for election about the tragedy of selling off and shrinking our public libraries, transforming them into real estate deals that benefit developers, not the public.
“Real estate developers. . lurking right behind the curtain . . . who are very anxious to get their hands on these valuable properties”?: The mayor knows whereof he speaks. In 2013 Mr. de Blasio was being sent money by those involved in library sales, including the real estate development team seeking to turn the Brooklyn Heights library, Brooklyn’s central destination library on Cadman Plaza West at the corner of Tillary and Clinton, into a luxury tower. The proposal involves a vastly shrunken so-called “replacement” library of minimal size.
It’s a deal modeled on and closely replicating the sale of the beloved Donnell Library, conceived of at the very same time. There are links between the people conceiving these deals.
It makes no sense for the Mayor to be underfunding the libraries in a time of plenty, defying the advice of everyone, including the city’s daily newspapers, except to create an excuse to sell libraries. But plundering these assets is costly to the public.
With new revelations, the still uninvestigated money-losing Donnell sale is turning out to cost more than ever suspected. If the NYPL had restored a full-scale Donnell Library after selling its site, it would have been deep in the hole with a net loss, a situation very comparable to the now proposed sale of the Brooklyn Heights Tillary Clinton Library. But, additionally, Scott Sherman’s new book, “Patience and Fortitude- Power, Real Estate, and the Fight to Save a Public Library,” discloses that the NYPL spent almost $5 million to outfit the small, cramped temporary library filling in to replace the library since 2008.
That means that selling and shrinking down to 1/3-1/4 size a 97,000 square foot library across from MoMA, the NYPL netted less than $33 million. That paltry figure does not involve subtracting out the additional millions that have been spent for high-priced consultants to tell the NYPL that their idiotic ideas were smart ones, nor the annual rental cost for the temporary replacement library starting with $850,000 in 2008. . . . Those are escalating costs that sadly are still being incurred in today, even as you review the library’s budget.
The Brooklyn Heights central destination library is 63,000 feet of extraordinarily serviceable (and adaptable) square feet. That includes two half floors of underground space that, similar to the 42nd Street Central Reference Library, were set up to hold books for easy on-the-spot retrieval. To say that the building is sturdy is an understatement: When it was built, it was built with space set aside for a bomb shelter with the thought that people could go there to be protected against a nuclear attack.
The building was built in 1962 (at a cost in today’s dollars of about $20 million) and opened with a collection of 90,000 volumes. In 1991 it was enlarged and upgraded (at a cost in today’s dollars of about $10 million). Then, additionally, a reclamation of the space people once thought might be used as a bomb shelter added even more space for books.
All in all it is safe to say that with what the public has invested to build the building plus the value of the underlying land and potential future development and expansion rights the value of the building to the public is the neighborhood of about $85 million, perhaps closer to $100 million. Yet this sale for shrinkage will net virtually nothing when all the costs are considered. The Brooklyn Public library is stonewalling, refusing to reveal the costs. The City Council lets it.
You should also pay attention to the unexpectedly high costs of removing books from libraries and storing them off-site.
The design of this Brooklyn Downtown Library and its limestone and red granite was admired with some fanfare as “handsome” when it was opened. Because, like the Grand Army Plaza Library it is also the work of Francis Keally it is a complementary bookend to that admired library. It is similarly eligible for landmarking. Francis Keally was once the president of the Municipal Art Society back when that was a vital organization. He fought for preservation and good design. In this situation he would also be fighting for common sense and against greed and corruption.
Sincerely,
Michael D. D. White
Citizens Defending Libraries
PS: I hereby incorporate by reference Citizens Defending Library’s previous testimony before the Council about the harm to the public of underfunding libraries, eliminating books and librarians, selling and shrinking libraries for real estate deals that benefit developers, not the public. I specifically include that which you will find here:
• Tuesday, February 24, 2015, Report on Tuesday, February 24th City Council Hearing On Supporting Public Libraries in the City's Ten-Year Capital Plan Plus Testimony of Citizens Defending LibrariesAdditionally, I refer you (link provided below) to our web page about the upcoming June 17, 2015 hearing that will commence the process required to decide whether to sell and shrink the Brooklyn Heights Tillary Clinton Library. This will be the first ever hearing on such a sale because one was not required or held with respect to Donnell, or the now besieged 34th Street Science, Industry and Business library.
• Tuesday, June 3, 2014, Report on Tuesday, June 3rd-9th City Council Hearing On Budget For NYC Libraries Plus Testimony of Citizens Defending Libraries
• Wednesday, December 10, 2014, Report on Wednesday, December 10th City Council Hearing On Future of Capital Budget For NYC Libraries Plus Testimony of Citizens Defending Libraries
• Brooklyn Community Board 2 Land Use Committee June 17, 2015: ULURP Hearing- First Hearing About Whether To Sell & Shrink Downtowns’s Brooklyn Heights Library (Tillary & Clinton)February 24, 2015
James G. Van Bramer, Chair
Committee on Cultural Affairs,
Libraries and International Intergroup Relations
Council Chambers
City Hall
New York, NY 10017
Re: Oversight – Supporting Public Libraries in the City's Ten-Year Capital Plan.
Dear Committee:
Since March 2013 we at Citizens Defending Libraries have been testifying at City Council hearings raising issues about proposed library sales and shrinkages, the elimination of books and librarians and the underfunding of libraries as an excuse for plans that benefit the private real estate industry, but not the public.
We have raised many still unanswered and important questions.
We have, I think, in multiple ways, proven ourselves ultimately to be right as facts were disclosed. The Donnell sale and the fact that the Central Library Plan was finally estimated to cost more than a half billion dollars, more than $200 million beyond what the NYPL had previously publicized are just two examples. I don’t think that any facts show us to ever have been far off the mark.
In connection with the June 3rd-June 9th hearings of this committee on these subjects we furnished City Council members and made publicly available (now on the web) many specific questions that need to be asked about these matters. Yet, aside from a few questions asked by the Public Advocate, whose time was restricted, most of those questions were and now remain unasked. (We incorporate into our testimony here the record of our submission and testimony at that June 3rd-June 9th and those previous hearings.)
There is serious lack of transparency on the part of library administration officials and the city real estate officials who are directing themselves to selling off libraries. We have requested, by FOIL, documents to which we are entitled, but have been stonewalled and furnished with nothing but meager and obfuscating information. Where is the BPL’s Strategic Real Estate Plan hailing back to 2007, or the Revson Study calling for turning libraries into real estate development? Where are the facts and book census information about how many books are disappearing from our libraries?
Since June a “study” by the Center for an Urban Future and the Architectural League of New York about “Re-Envisioning New York’s Branch Libraries” has been promoted, but whatever good ideas were mixed into it, we could not help but hear during the presentations how libraries were to be considered tools for development with the public “placatingly” told that they would be able have better libraries if consent was given to increased density, development, and upzonings otherwise likely to be rejected. . .
. . . . Study architects also spoke of plans to reduce books according to the advice of two librarians, one of whom expressed favor for removing books from the libraries, saying that eight-year-old children should be scolded if they came into the library to research Black History Month or women’s history, looking for related biographies without first calling to say they desired such books to be at the library. That librarian, who said that professional researchers should be treated the same way, doesn’t seem to understand how research is really done. These kinds of “studies” are in no way a substitute for the investigation it is incumbent upon the City Council to pursue.
It is exceedingly troubling that we have not yet restored library funding to pre-Bloomberg, pre-library sell-off plan levels. By contrast, Austin, Texas, one of the nation’s preeminent tech-based cities, is doing what its voters want: They are properly funding libraries which means enlarging them and increasing the number of books. It is a shame that we in New York are not similarly doing what the voters want and deserve.
Sincerely,
Michael D. D. White
Co-founder,
Citizens Defending Libraries
June 11, 2014
James G. Van Bramer, Chair
Committee on Cultural Affairs,
Libraries and International Intergroup Relations
Costa Constantinides, Chair
Subcommittee on libraries
Julissa Ferreras, Chair
Committee on Finance
City Council Chambers
City Hall, New York 10017
Re: June 3rd-9th, 2014- New York City Council Fiscal Year 2015 Executive Budget Hearings
Dear Committee:
I begin my Citizens Defending Libraries testimony here for this City Council’s Finance and Library subcommittee hearing on the library budget by noting the following, a fact that’s most odd and significant about this hearing. . . something that cries out for City Council examination. .
. . . On Monday, just one day before the City Council would commence and `take testimony’ at this hearing from the three library presidents about the library system budget needs of the city, copies of The New York Times arrived on the public’s doorstep with a major story about New York City library system budget needs, apparently fed to the Times by the New York Public Library, intentionally at the very last minute:
• Library Reveals Details and Costs of Upgrade Plan, By Robin Pogrebin, June 1, 2014.According to the Times: “officials, for the first time, revealed that the original plan, mostly scrapped last month in large part because of questions about the price tag, would actually have cost more than $500 million, according to independent estimates they commissioned last June.”
“Last June?”- And this news was coming out a day before the hearing?
Melville House was able to quickly relay the Times report with its own article bearing an appropriately sarcastic title:
• Now they tell us: NYPL admits that the Central Library Plan would have cost $200 million more than estimated, by Sal Robinson, June 2, 2014.The Monday revelation in the Times confirmed something that reports of the demise of Central Library Plan the previous month also confirmed: That Citizens Defending Libraries, and other critics of the Central Library Plan were right, that we have been more than right, as we insisted that there was a panoply of questions imperative to ask about this expensive and obvious real estate boondoggle plan to sell off, shrink and destroy New York City libraries, banishing their books.
Even as the Times report confirmed how extremely on target the questions that we long demanded be asked were, it raised formidable new questions as it reported how, suspiciously, just in time for the hearing, the NYPL had a new vaguely described (and not yet examined) “revised” set of plans with an “anticipated budget” that just so happens “matches what the library had originally suggested [in] its previous plan — to insert a circulating branch at its main library at 42nd Street — might cost.” Yes, that’s right, a new “black box” from the people who brought you the Central Library Plan (and Donnell) . . . The people who fought to convince the public to accept this scheme for five years, engaging high-paid lobbyists and consultants to help.
The Melville House article pointed out some of the other questions now standing out in stark relief by virtue of the Times report:
Among the many questions this revelation raises is when library officials knew this information and why it wasn't made public earlier. Did the library have these numbers even as it went ahead with emptying the stacks, and trying to drum up or lobby into being support for the plan? Pogrebin's article is mum on this, nor do the estimates appear to have been made available for public scrutiny. In short, it's an admission very much in keeping with the way the NYPL conducted the entire renovation program to begin with: move along folks, there's nothing to see here, except that $200,000,000+ we might have accidentally been about to spend.That Melville House article noted that among the “numerous questions left” are four listed by Scott Sherman in his “post mortem” of the Central Library Plan in The Nation on May 14, 2014:
First, will Marx repair the decrepit Mid-Manhattan Library, or will he let it deteriorate even further so as to sell it down the road under a more developer-friendly mayor? Second, in 2013 the NYPL hastily removed 3 million books from the stacks in preparation for their demolition. The Wall Street Journal has reported that the stacks will remain empty, an unacceptable outcome for a building that was designed as a splendid machine for book storage and delivery. Marx should convene a public meeting in the library’s Celeste Bartos Forum to discuss the future of the stacks and the various alternatives for them. (He must also clarify how many books and photographs were damaged when the stacks were emptied.) Third, Norman Foster has already received $9 million for a design that was partly scrapped—a reckless disbursement of funds from a library system in chronic financial difficulty. Marx has refused to reveal the source of that money. Did it come from the NYPL, or from one or several of its trustees? Last, will the NYPL’s eighty-eight branch libraries, many of which are in poor neighborhoods, now receive the funds they need to flourish?(See: The Battle of 42nd Street- The demise of the New York Public Library’s Central Library Plan is the end of a Bloomberg-era castle in the sky)
Obviously there are many, many hard, delving questions the City Council should be asking of the library heads in order to properly acquit itself of its responsibilities in providing and overseeing budget funds to the New York City libraries this year. Attached, and made part of this testimony, is a far from entirely inclusive list of the kinds of questions City Council Members should have been directing to the library heads at this hearing, but almost entirely failed in doing so. In addition, I am including and incorporating by reference the Citizens Defending Libraries testimony given at the earlier March 11, 2014 hearing, also in connection with preparation of this budget, which likewise serves to raise all of these sorts of questions for asking.
What the City Council did instead of asking any of these imperative questions should be regarded as a disgrace. Setting aside approximately a half hour of time for the heads of the libraries to testify and be questioned about budget matters, the City Council allowed more than ten minutes of that time to be taken up by the library heads playing a highly-produced, PR-style video that ran and churned up more than 10 minutes of hearing time. The theme of the video that had been up on the internet for at least a month?: That libraries are good. (See- Vimeo Video: Libraries Now: A Day In The Life, by Julie Dressner and Jesse Hicks, May 16, 2014.)
Rather than ask the necessary questions, the substitute of showing the film ran out the clock and worse.
We all agree that libraries are good. There is no controversy about any points the film made to that effect, but the film provided little edification and was so inconsequential to the key issues now needing to be considered with respect to New York City libraries and serious jeopardy they are in, that Citizens Defending Libraries did not circulate the video to our members when it appeared.
The film, is actually more deceptive than anything else. With its focus on local library branches, beginning with the opening sequence shots of libraries in Brooklyn and Queens, it likely provides a sense of false security to the public that this is the direction in which city budget funds are being directed, rather than acknowledging how we were instead on the verge of misdirecting a half billion dollars into the Central Library Plan boondoggle and how other real estate boondoggles now threaten to rob the public of significant assets.
When I delivered my oral version of this testimony at the hearing I was chastised for saying that the City Council had not done its job by a City Council member who suggested that the City Council had actually had a hand in investigating and killing the Central Library Plan. Is that actually true and did that City Council member mean to take any personal credit for doing the right thing? Any evidence to that effect that is openly available and public is to the contrary.*
(* For instance, City Council Member Brad Lander is considered a "progressive" leader in the City Council. On April 24, 2014, at political club meeting where I questioned Mr. Lander about his position about selling and shrinking libraries Mr. Lander said he still didn't know enough about the Central Library Plan to have any idea of whether that plan was a proper use of the proposed massive amount of funds involved or whether those funds being used sell and shrink would better used elsewhere for other purposes. That was less than two weeks before abandonment of the Central Library Plan was finally forced and, at the time, other key City Council Members were also claiming noncommittal ignorance. It is anomalous that, at such a very late juncture City Council Member Brad Lander was too ill-informed to oppose the Central Library Plan, yet he, as a general proponent of library sales, considers himself well enough informed about the proposed Brooklyn Heights Library sale, another similar plan for library shrinkage to generate a real estate deal to promote it. This is something he did at this hearing. He did it while City Councilman Steve Levin, in whose district the library lies, was out of the room.)Later in the hearing that same City Council member who had just chastised me told Carolyn McIntyre of Citizens Defending Libraries that the Donnell Library sale was inexcusable and would never be repeated. But past is prologue and it's vitally important and urgent to understand the past in order to understand and properly deal with the present. Nevertheless, this same City Council member defending the City Council said that the council shouldn’t be asking questions about Donnell or its investigation even though the City Council has never investigated or figured out what happened with respect to the sale of that important, destination library.
That council member specifically dismissed the questions provided herewith as not worth asking. Maybe it's not fair to think that every City Council Member ought to believe that every one of the questions suggested below is worth asking, but surely at least a fair number of these question should be considered worth asking as Public Advocate Tish James did.
Citizens Defending Libraries and our fellow critic of library sales have been right in asking the questions we asked before, and because we were so very right the questions we ask now should be considered with equal seriousness and urgency. . . Plans are afoot to sell and shrink New York City libraries, to exile books from the premises of our libraries and banish librarians. Why city and library administration officials would do this for the purpose of creating real estate deals, not for the benefit of the public needs to be investigated and deeply scrutinized by the City Council. Among other things, it is essential to a proper administration of the city’s budget. But the City Council has fallen down on the job, neglecting its duty to protect and represent the public.
Sincerely
Michael D. D. White
Citizens Defending Libraries
The questions that Citizens Defending Libraries furnished the City Council and that still have never been asked of them are available on our web pages.
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Testimony of CDL co-founder Michael D. D. White: Bloomberg interposed between public and the libraries, imposed self-cannibalizing sell-offs and shrinkages
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| Michael D. D. White on right- one of four more panelist delivering testimony against library sell-offs |
James G. Van Bramer, Chair
Committee on Cultural Affairs,
Libraries and International Intergroup Relations
250 Broadway
New York, NY 10017
Re: New York City Council Fiscal Year 2015 Preliminary Budget, Mayor's FY '14 Preliminary Management Report and Agency Oversight Hearings
Dear Committee:
The public wants its libraries and is absolutely willing to pay for them: Ask the community boards about their priorities. Or, you can do any kind of poll or “people’s budget” and confirm exactly the same thing.
Libraries cost little in the scheme of things, are heavily used and because they are so important to the economy of a growing city, they more than pay for themselves.
Now let’s deal with the fact that the Bloomberg administration did something that is the opposite of what elected officials should so: It interposed itself between the people and the libraries they want, deliberately underfunding them, and acting in coordination with library administration officials (whose dedication and commitment to the public good we are now beginning to properly challenge), to impose a program of self-cannibalizing sell-offs and shrinkages. Why? We note how these deals benefit real estate developers, not the public.
It is wasteful to destroy and sell valuable libraries, like the Donnell Library, that can’t be replaced. Donnell was sold for an as yet unexplained, as yet uninvestigated pittance, netting the NYPL less than $39 million for a five-story, 97,000 square foot library when the penthouse apartment in the 50-story building replacing it is on the market for $60 million.
Some of these absurd schemes make especially easy targets: The NYPL’s Central Library Plan diverts at least $350 million dollars in library funds (perhaps ultimately as much as a half billion dollars) to sell and drastically shrink libraries and get rid of books and librarians, with at least $150 million of that being in the form of new money the taxpayers are being asked to come up with to add to the waste. We are speaking of libraries that were last expanded for lack of space at taxpayer expense recently, as recently as 2002, and libraries like the Mid-Manhattan library that the Giuliani administration proposed to nearly double in size.
I suggest to you the imperative that Libraries be funded by the mayor and City Council with the specific condition that the money not be used wastefully to sell and shrink libraries. You must insist because if that is not made so, we all face a conundrum in giving to the libraries, guessing how our money will be wasted. This kind of waste by the Trustees of money and assets provided by the taxpayers must be investigated as the Comptroller, among others, has promised.
What should this city budget this year look like? The Bloomberg administration, wanting to sell and shrink libraries, underfunded them for years. That’s funding that should now be made up, but it is important to recognize that the accumulation of capital expenditures needing to be caught up with can be spaced out over a number of years. That’s the nature of capital expenditures.
Do we have as much catching up to do as we think? It’s important to recognize that, in generating excuses to advocate for the sale of libraries like Donnell and for sales and shrinkage of the system, library administration officials have suspiciously inflated the cost of repairs reported to be necessary for Donnell, Mid-Manhattan, Pacific Branch and Brooklyn Heights Library. So don’t assume. Skepticism is essential along with greater transparency, and we must replace the existing trustees and library administration officials with more trustworthy and reliable individuals or there can be no assurance that funds will be used as they ought. That is why it is critical to halt the CLP, and essential to halt the other similar proposed library sales and shrinkages, a halt to continue at the very least through the entirety of the next budget year and a great deal of investigation.
Libraries equal democracy and books should not just be for the wealthy! I leave you with a picture advertisement from the Sunday New York Times Magazine. Its message worth a thousand words?: The luxury apartments in “The Baccarat” tower replacing the Donnell will have more books than libraries in the NYPL system!
Sincerely
Michael D. D. White
Citizens Defending Libraries
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| Picture attached to testimony. It was previously Tweeted: "Wrong w/ this picture? Luxury apartments replacing Donnell Library have more books than NYPL |
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| Same picture being held up during testimony |
March 11 2014
James G. Van Bramer, Chair
Committee on Cultural Affairs,
Libraries and International Intergroup Relations
250 Broadway
New York, NY 10017
Re: New York City Council Fiscal Year 2015 Preliminary Budget, Mayor's FY '14 Preliminary Management Report and Agency Oversight Hearings
Dear Committee:
I wish to submit the following testimony for the March 11, 2014 hearing on
"New York City Council Fiscal Year 2015 Preliminary Budget, Mayor's FY '14 Preliminary Management Report and Agency Oversight Hearings."
It is an email I sent to one of the NYPL trustees, Robert Darnton. The trustees are meeting today. My letter is a "view from the trenches" about how research at the library is being impacted by the "Central Library Plan."
To: robert.darnton@harvard.edu Date: March 11, 2014
Dear Dr. Darnton
I'm writing because you are on the Board of Trustees of the New York Public Library. Also, I've read a couple of your books: of particular note, The Case for Books. In it, you argue against the trend among librarians to dispose of - indeed, destroy - physical books and newspapers, trusting that their contents will be preserved in perpetuity in a digital format.
Therefore, I hope that you, given your interest in the book, can protest the current plan to move the research collection offsite and replace the emptied space with a circulating library, with many fewer books and much less space.
I am a book indexer by profession. In the past, I've relied on the Main Library to fulfill my research needs when I am working on a new project. Starting about December 2012, I have found there is very little use in going to the Main Library because most of the books I will be looking for have been moved offsite.
Here's a live example. Currently I've been indexing a biography of Eddie Rickenbacker, the World War I ace pilot. I compiled a list of nine titles that I wanted to consult, and went to the Main Library to look for them. Of these nine titles, six were offsite (meaning New Jersey). Two were in the circulating collection at Mid Manhattan, and they happened to be available. The most important one - Rickenbacker: an Autobiography - was available for "use in library". I called that up and referred to it onsite. Since my work is on a deadline, I judged it would be fruitless to order the six offsite volumes to be delivered in a day or two.
This is the way it goes these days. The Main Library has become quite hopeless as a source of ready information on any deep level. I am thinking of subscribing to another research library at a considerable yearly expense.
Why is this happening? It's quite apparent that this is a real estate deal in the works, part of a larger movement to sell off public assets to the benefit of the 1%. The new city administration may stop the deal for the time being - but wouldn't it be a neater outcome if the NYPL trustees come to their senses and decide the issues on the merits? The New York Public Library was founded on the basis of advancing knowledge - not as an asset to be mined.
Yours truly
Peter Rooney
For further information: citizensdefendinglibraries.blogspot.com
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| The night of City Council hearing Mr. Rooney's message, calling for the books to be brought back was reiterated by The Iluminator on the walls of the Central Reference Library. Tweeted. It's the nigh before the NYPL Trustees meeting and a big protest against it. |
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| Also Tweeted |
March 11 2014
James G. Van Bramer, Chair
Committee on Cultural Affairs,
Libraries and International Intergroup Relations
250 Broadway
New York, NY 10017
Re: New York City Council Fiscal Year 2015 Preliminary Budget, Mayor's FY '14 Preliminary Management Report and Agency Oversight Hearings
Dear Committee:
The saying “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance” applies here. In New York City everyone uses the library. It is the most democratic of institutions that is used in a multitude of ways. It serves as a place to educate all; to keep children and teens safe after school, as a resource for the elderly who have no place else to go, a meeting place for girl scouts, a place to host reading groups and so many other things that serve all people.
As the usage went up over the last few years, the budget went down enabling the library officials to cut staff, hours, and to allow for libraries to fall in disrepair.
Now it is time for the new administration and this new “progressive” council to make amends and provide the budget that is needed to keep this amazing gesture of Democracy, our libraries, in full repair without selling, closing and shrinking any of them. It is time for this administration to remove our libraries from the clutches of the voracious real estate industry that has taken over the leadership of our libraries. Throw out the real estate moguls and hedge fund executive that now sit as trustees and throw out the library strategy group, who only exist to sell libraries. Throw out the CEOs with their $400,000 salaries and $2 million dollar severance packages. Throw out the expensive lobbying and PR flack that now receive the money that should go to the salaries of credentialed librarians. Throw out the reckless mentality that has put real estate needs before the needs of all people. That is where our public money has gone.
It is too late for that treasure of a library, the Donnell, but it is not too late for the rest of our libraries.
It is time for the mean spirited environment that has existed in this city against the regular people for the last 12 years, to be cleansed.
For what we get in return and the number of people served, we pay a very small price for our libraries in the big scheme of things. Fund our libraries and all our public assets that serve all the people. Once these jewels are gone there is no going back.
Sincerely
Lucy Koteen
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| Four panelists testifying against selling and shrinking libraries: Right to left, Lucy Koteen, Carolyn McIntyre, Vera Conant, Christabel Gough |
March 11 2014
James G. Van Bramer, Chair
Committee on Cultural Affairs,
Libraries and International Intergroup Relations
250 Broadway
New York, NY 10017
Re: New York City Council Fiscal Year 2015 Preliminary Budget, Mayor's FY '14 Preliminary Management Report and Agency Oversight Hearings
Dear Committee:
Chairman Van Bramer, Chairman Constantinides, Members of the City Council, thank you for holding this hearing.
New York City must return to funding its Public Institutions on behalf of the People who live here and pay taxes for those institutions. And on behalf of those highly qualified former employees who have been let go from these institutions. I think of the Municipal Archives, whose staff has been cut to less than 1/3 of what it was 25 years ago, and whose records and ability to serve the people of our great city suffer from those cuts. The “corporate model” is not applicable to Public Institutions (Cf. WSJ, 24ii14, on Non-Profit Boards), unless we wish to follow -- as we seem to, in so many of our underfunded public cultural institutions -- the example and path of Late Ancient Rome, like lemmings over the cliff.
So too, the Public Libraries of our City. Their funding has been cut drastically and ruthlessly during the past two administrations. With concomitant rises in unemployment of highly qualified and dedicated librarians, including reference librarians, cataloguers and curators. Instead, we have a Public Library System run by a Board of so-called “Trustees” (a number of whom are active in Real Estate Development and Finance, rather than Research and Librarianship) who hire -- at the cost of those now absent qualified librarians -- expensive public relations managers as administrators, thereby crippling a once-vital public library system, essential to the people of our great city.
When I was called upon to found the Renaissance Studies Program at the CUNY Graduate Center in the late 1980s, having been trained at Columbia University and lived and worked in Europe for 15 years, I felt that New York must become the American center for Renaissance Studies, because of its library facilities. The situating of the Graduate Center on 42nd Street in the Grace Building had, in fact, been based on the immediate proximity of the Research Branch of the NYPL. The existence of the New York Public Library just across the street, was a strong argument in my application to the New York Board of Regents for Certification. The Main Research Branch was then still functioning like a beehive of experts: cataloguers in particular fields, book binders and conservators. Its collections in Slavonic Studies and other specialties were still run by full-time curators in those fields. This is how the Great Research Libraries of the World are run.
The Mid-Manhattan Branch Library, another example, is a model of the General Reference and Circulation Library, as was the Donnell in my youth. It caters to huge numbers of people from all over New York City, and it has a well-stocked foreign-language section, as well as audio, visual, and internet resources. It also hosts lectures, and even movies on Sundays. This is a Neighborhood Library on a grand scale, serving the People of our entire City. Of course, like other neighborhood libraries, it has been allowed by recent administrations to fall into disrepair -- creating the false argument that it is too expensive to rescue.
The Board’s proposal, however, seems to be to sell this public success story to a private individual (who may own abutting lots), so he can make as huge a profit from City-owned property as has the present owner of the former Donnell Library site (one apartment of which was recently on the market for more than one and a half times the price that was paid to the NYPL for the whole site). The proposal seems, further, to cram the facilities of, and people using, the Mid-Manhattan Library and the Science, Industry and Business Library (SIBL) into the Book Stacks of the Research Library. The resulting congestion is unimaginable. And it goes along with the extreme inconvenience to researchers attempting to use the Research Library, most of whose books are now stored, as you know, in New Jersey and Upstate. [That inconvenience was detailed in my September 30th, 2013 testimony to this Committee.]
What is astonishing now is that the simple alternative of directing the taxpayers’ $150,000,000 to rebuilding (within the shell of the Arnold Constable Building) the Mid-Manhattan Library as a State-of-the-Art Circulation and General Reference Library, with all the built-in internet power needed for the foreseeable future -- and then some! -- has apparently been discarded by the Board. This, despite the Architectural Contest held, judged, and won, at considerable expense, in 1999. (The NYPL's argument that they cannot move a whole library for the few years it would take to build -- either within the Arnold Constable building or from scratch -- is belied by the fact that they have already moved -- without consultation or oversight -- some four million research books to storage sites in New Jersey and Upstate New York, thereby largely eviscerating the Research Branch.) The Board has discarded these perfectly feasible plans in favor of destroying a formerly Great Research Library, which has always been, in deep reality, a “people’s library” -- a place where anyone from any stratum in the City could better his or her education and/or fulfill his or her most sophisticated research needs. A rentable tower -- even a green tower -- could be built (after requesting a zoning easement) above the 6 or 7 stories needed for the State-of-the-Art Library. It could also retain the easily visible, inviting and easily accessible ground floor entrance to the Mid-Manhattan Library, as well as housing SIBL. This would serve the People of the City’s needs, and provide steady income for both the Mid-Manhattan and SIBL Libraries, and the World-Renowned Main Research Library.
It would also save our City’s face internationally.
Thank you.
C. M. Pyle
Intellectual and Cultural Historian
(Ph.D. Columbia University; FAAR 1978;
CASVA iii-iv2001; NIAS 2002-3)
http://sites.google.com/site/cynthiampyle/
Testimony of CDL co-founder Michael D. D. White- City Council is unable to competently oversee capital expenditures for libraries given pervasive lack of transparency
March 11 2014
James G. Van Bramer, Chair
Committee on Cultural Affairs,
Libraries and International Intergroup Relations
250 Broadway
New York, NY 10017
Re: New York City Council Fiscal Year 2015 Preliminary Budget, Mayor's FY '14 Preliminary Management Report and Agency Oversight Hearings
Dear Committee:
The profound lack of transparency with respect to the capital budgets for New York City libraries hampers and makes virtually impossible the City Council’s job of properly administering and overseeing the provision of city capital funds to the libraries, just as that lack of transparency is also a barrier to those others, private citizens and organizations, who might join with the city in providing funds to our New York City libraries to pay for capital expenditures that would benefit the public.
Here are examples of that lack of transparency:
• In June of 2007 the NYPL previewed and had blessed by the Bloomberg administration plans to sell and shrink New York City library space. Similarly, in the summer of 2007 Bloomberg administration officials were looking at equivalent plans involving library real estate in the Brooklyn system. Neither the City Council nor the public were advised of these plans. If any individual members of the City Council were so informed they did not pass that information along. Instead, in November 2007, the City Council was surprised by the sudden, secretively-handled, selling off the five-story Donnell Library at 53rd Street that netted only a fraction of the value that library represented to the public. That apparently served as the first test run for future such sales. Then the Bloomberg administration started cutting back on library funding. Without being able to view these ensuing Bloomberg administration’s cutbacks in the context of the planned sell-offs of library real estate (which the Bloomberg underfunding would be cited as justifying) the City Council and the public could not properly evaluate that underfunding or its motivation.In the end it is not merely a lack of transparency. In the end the pervasive lack of transparency must also raise questions about the priorities and motives of those who are not being transparent.
• A Request for Proposals has been issued by Bloomberg administration officials working with Brooklyn Public Library officials to sell The Brooklyn Heights Library. Ostensibly, that library, a significant and important capital asset for the public, is being sold and shrunk to raise dollars for the BPL’s capital budget. There is of course the problem that any sale proceeds would not go to the BPL, but to the city, because it is the city that owns the library. Setting that aside, there is a bigger problem that was not mentioned to the public or to the elected officials theoretically being informed about and overseeing the transaction: There is very little left to net any proceeds for the pubic because in 1986 most of the 10 FAR development rights were transferred out to Forest City Ratner. Even worse, analysis indicates that, if the library were sold, most of the benefit, perhaps even most of the sale proceeds, would be going to Forest City Ratner, not the public. And yet, in promoting this transaction library and city administration officials felt they could keep this information under wraps and out of the equation.
• The City Council and city are paying for major capital assets that should last for years even as those assets wind up being quickly and unexpectedly sold off. (Real estate assets are supposed to last at least 30 to 40 years.) We saw how SIBL, the new Science, Industry and Business Library, was paid for with $100 million that was intended to benefit the public, about half of that coming directly from the taxpayers, but more than 87% of SIBL was quietly sold off recently at what appears to be an appreciable loss, even as real estate prices in the Mid-town South neighborhood where it located with CUNY in the former Altman’s building, are going up substantially. Similarly, when the Donnell Library was suddenly sold for little money, publicly paid for recent renovations of about 20% of that building were prematurely scrapped.
• How can the City Council and those wanting to fund libraries make sensible decisions about where to invest these capital monies for the public benefit when plans to sell libraries are kept secretively kept under wraps until the last minute? The plan to sell the Brooklyn Heights Library was decided upon at least as far back as 2008, but it wasn’t publicly disclosed until 2013. How many years of capital funding had intervened?
• Just as library and Bloomberg administration officials have, by virtue of their secretiveness, raised questions about the trustworthiness of the way they furnish information, data furnished by these officials purporting to estimate capital costs is extremely suspect, apparently inflating to unbelievable numbers the cost of keeping and repairing real estate that administration officials want to hand off to developers. So, in the case of Donnell we find that 15% of that library had been recently renovated for $1 million (with perhaps 20% of the library having been recently renovated in all) including air conditioning, but library administration officials managed to estimate the remaining 80% of the building was in need of repairs that would come to $48 million. Really? Library administration officials love to cite outrageous air conditioning renovation needs whenever they want to sell a library. That’s the case in Brooklyn Heights Library where officials have gone through laughable gyrations to come up with an astronomical air conditioning repair figure, including deciding they will have to replace air conditioning that is currently working and will have to air condition a much greater amount of space than actually required.
• Capital dollars are supposed to pay for creation of buildings and space. But what is going on when colossal and extreme expenditures like the NYPL’s “Central Library Plan” (recently rechristened the “42nd Street Library Renovation Plan”) are paying for the shrinkage of space (and the handing off of real estate to developers). The last edition of the CLP, with expected overruns, may cost a half billion dollars, all money that is supposed to be going to benefit the public. It would be spent to pay for the reduction of more than 380,000 square feet down to 80,000 square feet of space. The NYPL does an obfuscatory dance to disguise the bottom line: Refusing to compare apples to apples, the NYPL `reasons’ that the shrunken space could be viewed as better space.
• Library administration officials seek capital dollars while leaving unexplained and unaccounted for how they have squandered (or perhaps worse) irreplaceable assets like Donnell in highly suspect transactions. NYPL officials are still refusing to answer questions about the Donnell transaction. Can the City Council consider that it is effectively overseeing the administration of the capital budget when those questions about the hundreds of millions of dollars of public benefit that were squandered remain unanswered and uninvestigated?
• The city is growing. It is a wealthier city than it has been before. The wisdom of selling libraries and shrinking library space at this time is highly questionable. The questionability of that wisdom cannot continue to go unaddressed when the city is providing the bulk of the library funds. Nevertheless, such things cannot be adequately addressed unless and until library administration officials have disclosed their complete city-wide ambitions in a comprehensive fashion enabling a proper economic impact analysis and City Council review. In the greater scheme of things, libraries cost little considering all the economic benefit they provide. There is also the civic benefit. As Walter Cronkite is often quoted: “Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation.”
• The lack of public review has been part of the overall lack of transparency and part of that must fall at the feet of the City Council. It is extremely problematic that the plans for the sell-offs of these libraries involving hundreds of millions of public dollars has progressed this far and for so many years and have not yet been the subject of through scrutinizing reviews by the City Council. This hearing should be just the first step of a much more thorough process.
Sincerely,
Michael D. D. White
Library sales are shocking and the shocks are only just coming to light
March 11 2014
James G. Van Bramer, Chair
Committee on Cultural Affairs,
Libraries and International Intergroup Relations
250 Broadway
New York, NY 10017
Re: New York City Council Fiscal Year 2015 Preliminary Budget, Mayor's FY '14 Preliminary Management Report and Agency Oversight Hearings
Dear Committee:
People are shocked when they find out that library administration officials are selling libraries, shrinking the library system and that libraries are being deliberately underfunded to create real estate deals that benefit developers, not the public. Who would have thought that they would sell off the public libraries when usage is way up? How can the public defend itself against those who would think to do so?
The public is mostly still just finding out about these plans. Much of the plan to sell libraries is not yet fully unveiled or has been done so quietly that the public hasn’t yet found out about it. How many people know that most of the SIBL, the Science and Industry Business Library, built at a cost to the public of $100 million in 1996, has been sold for a mere $60.8 million? That sale, part of the consolidating shrinkage of the Central Library Plan involving three major Manhattan libraries (four if you count Donnell as you probably should) is only part of what’s happening overall.
Despite the public’s disapproval, the Brooklyn Public Library is plowing ahead with its plan to sell the Brooklyn Heights Library, closely replicating the unpopular sale-for-shrinkage of Manhattan’s Donnell library, which was closed for shrinkage in 2008 to be replaced by a 50-story building, a luxury hotel and condominiums. The Donnell sale netted the NYPL less than $39 million!
If you want to know what may be in store when plans like this are not transparent, direct your attention to what those plan-makers do first and what they can do when they do things in secret. Look at the top-down plotted Donnell sale, shrinking the library down to less than one third size (from 97,000 square feet to 28,000 square feet), where it will be mostly underground and sadly bookless, demolishing that five-story building that was recently the beneficiary of publicly paid for renovations. Fifteen percent of the building was the extensively renovated media center paid for by the city and state. In addition, there was the capacious and beautiful auditorium and the new Teen Center.
The same people who brought us Donnell say they consider it a model for what to do to other libraries in the future and are now in charge of the fire sale to sell Mid Manhattan and SIBL and destroy the research stacks of the fabled 42nd Street Central Reference Library. All of the Brooklyn Public Library’s real estate is up for “leveraging” in similar deals, including the Brooklyn Heights, and Pacific Libraries. They are selling the most valuable libraries first.
Libraries should represent the best of our democracy. To sell them off in deals benefitting a few at the expense of the many is democracy’s antithesis. We are starving our libraries out of existence, but keeping them would cost a relative pittance and reflect the public’s true priorities.
If we can’t stop the developer-driven sell-off of our libraries, we won’t be able to stop any transfers of public resources for private, not public, benefit.
Sincerely,
Citizens Defending Libraries
PS: As part of this testimony here we are supplying herewith a list with links of various articles Noticing New York articles about the sell-off of the city’s libraries including, how comparatively little value the public is getting for their sale, how disappointing and unlibrarylike the planed new libraries are, and how discriminatorily anti-democratic these sales are. The links will also inform you how dramatically books available in Manhattan’s flagship, destination libraries are being reduced (with NYPL Trustees exercising no note), from one the order fo 13 million or more books to perhaps as few as 3.5 million. It will also inform you how recently things pivoted: The Guiliani administration, at taxpayer expense, expanding libraries that lacked space that the Bloomberg administration sought to shrink.
• Saturday, June 22, 2013, On Charlie Rose NYPL Trustee Stephen Schwarzman Confirms Suspicions: His $100 Million To The Library Was Linked To NYPL’s Real Estate Plans
• Saturday, June 15, 2013, SIBL, NYPL's Science, Industry and Business Library Sold At An Unreported Loss To The Public (And an Elucidating Sideways Look At The BAM South Library Real Estate Games)
• Friday, May 24, 2013, Previews Of The Proposed New Donnell Library: The NYPL Unveils Its Version Of The “Silk Purse” Libraries It Envisions For Our Future
• Monday, May 27, 2013, More Thoughts On Valuation And What The NYPL Should Have Received As Recompense For The Public When It Sold The Donnell Library
• Tuesday, May 14, 2013, A Consideration of Race, Equality, Opportunity and Democracy As NYC Libraries Are Sold And The Library System Shrunk And Deliberately Underfunded
• Saturday, July 13, 2013, Deceptive Representations By New York Public Library On Its Central Library Plan: We’re NOT Shrinking Library Space, We Are Making MORE Library Space!
• Saturday, September 14, 2013, Empty Bookshelves As Library Officials Formulate A New Vision of Libraries: A Vision Where The Real Estate Will Be Sold Off
• Friday, September 20, 2013, Forest City Ratner As The Development Gatekeeper (And Profit taker) Getting The Benefit As Brooklyn Heights Public Library Is Sold
• Thursday, March 7, 2013, Tossing Dwarfs?: It’s Time To Demand That We Change The Way We Fund Libraries . . End The False Political Theater
• Wednesday, November 27, 2013, Are NYPL Trustees Flying Blind on The Basics? Numbers To Inform Them About The Drastic Dwindling of Books In Manhattan’s Principal Libraries Are Missing From Their Minutes
• Thursday, November 21, 2013, Drastically Reducing Manhattan’s Main Library Space (At City Expense), The NYPL Was Only Just Recently Increasing Its Space (At City Expense)
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| Graph from one of the articles above: From 1987 to an envisioned 2015 (with an implemented Central Library Plan), how total number of books in Manhattan's principal libraries is declining drastically. Over 12 million books in 1996 and 2003 to perhaps 4.2 million books (or even far fewer?) when CLP is implemented. Starting figures in the graph for 1987 and 1992 are graphed lower than than they actually should be because they don't include unknown numbers for Mid-Manhattan and Donnell |
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| Graph from one of the articles above: From 1987 to an envisioned 2015 (with an implemented Central Library Plan), total actual midtown Manhattan Library destination space actual and planned, first going up and then going lower than ever before |
March 11 2014
James G. Van Bramer, Chair
Committee on Cultural Affairs,
Libraries and International Intergroup Relations
250 Broadway
New York, NY 10017
Re: New York City Council Fiscal Year 2015 Preliminary Budget, Mayor's FY '14 Preliminary Management Report and Agency Oversight Hearings
Dear Committee:
I am here today to shine a light on what is happening to our public libraries. I appreciate that this City Council Committee is providing this opportunity for those of us who love libraries and respect the place they have in our democracy. I am not a librarian, a hedge fund manager or a real estate developer. I am a therapist and a concerned citizen who could not watch these sacred spaces continue to be exploited and the librarians devalued.
I became aware of the attempts to close and sell my library, the Brooklyn Heights Library, in January 2013 at a community meeting at the library. Our branch is a very well used and loved branch. It is the most well used branch apart from the main library in Brooklyn because of its location and staff. The library sits right where all the major subway lines converge and where multiple bus lines stop. The Brooklyn Heights Library draws about a half million people a year from all over Brooklyn, Manhattan and the Bronx. No other library is accessible by so many subway and bus lines.
At the meeting BPL spokesman, Josh Nachowitz, said they were going to sell the building to a private developer, let him tear it down and build a high-rise that would house a much smaller library, about 1/4 the size. He also said they would remove the Business and Career services. We were stunned and told him it was a bad idea.
I might have walked away doing nothing about the news except that I found out from a study by the Center For An Urban Future that use of libraries has gone up 40% and circulations up 59%. More people want to learn than ever. The report says the users are teens, seniors, immigrants, freelancers, job seekers, nannies and parents with young kids.
This report says that funding has gone down about 30% since Bloomberg started his third term. I heard from library staff that they have had to cut over 1,000 positions. They have provided an increasingly used service with decreasing staff! We owe them our gratitude.
I began asking people coming into the Brooklyn Heights Library why they use it. Just like in the report: Teens find it’s safe, they can be with friends while their parents are at work, nannies congregate with kids, parents come for the art programs and story time, business owners get help growing their business, job seekers get help with their resumes, now people are coming to get help with doing taxes.
I met a woman named Celeste who started a baking business using the Business and Career Services library. She came to research on different ways of baking and she entered a contest for small businesses which offers cash prizes. Her two sons were with her and I asked them why they come. They said to check out books and DVDs and it’s a quiet place to do homework. I talked with lots of seniors and retirees who come almost every day.
There is a line a block long outside this branch when it opens at 10:00 AM. Inside the library there is a giant sign that says “the line starts here.” It‘s to use the computers. They want to close and shrink this branch? It makes no sense.
I started a petition a week after the meeting to stop the public policy of defunding libraries in order to sell the real estate to private developers. We now have about 14,000 signatures, mostly online, and you can easily find Citizens Defending Libraries on the web.
Since starting the petition it has become increasingly clear that a corporate-style takeover of the NYPL and the BPL leadership is being followed by the selling of significant library system assets, rushing to do this before the end of Bloomberg's term in spite of growing public opposition. Nothing they are doing makes sense in terms of what is best for the library or the public, but makes total sense in creating lucrative real estate deals for private investment companies and developers in real estate.
The new corporatist leadership under individuals hailing from Wall Street, Steven Schwartzman and David Offensend, may conceive of themselves as “leveraging” the real estate. New highly paid groups called “strategy groups” concentrate their time on pursuing real estate deals while librarians who have always done the real work of the libraries are being eliminated and replaced with lower-paid clerical staff.
Does this pattern sound familiar? Aren't we also seeing this happen to our schools, hospitals, and parks? This exploitation of public resources at the end of Bloomberg's term benefitting the one-percent while reducing resources and opportunities for the rest of society sends the message that a few count for everything and the rest count for practically nothing. If this exploitation and plundering is not stopped we stand to lose much more than real estate; we stand to lose all that made our democracy great. After taking all that they can that our ancestors and generous donors gave, what will be left?
We are either moving towards a more caring society or away from a caring society. Citizens Defending Libraries is demanding better from our elected and library administration officials. We need to affirm that all New Yorkers are worthy and deserving of these important public services.
Thank you for listening.
Sincerely,
Citizens Defending Libraries
Which Libraries Are In Danger? Might Yours Be Next? Library Officials Divide-and-Conquer Strategy
March 11 2014
James G. Van Bramer, Chair
Committee on Cultural Affairs,
Libraries and International Intergroup Relations
250 Broadway
New York, NY 10017
Re: New York City Council Fiscal Year 2015 Preliminary Budget, Mayor's FY '14 Preliminary Management Report and Agency Oversight Hearings
Dear Committee:
The question arises from the public: Which New York City libraries are at risk from the current program of selling off and shrinking libraries as real estate deals?
We need library administration officials to disclose the entirety of their sell-off plans to the public and there needs to be an independent economic impact analysis of their plans.
As of now all the City's libraries are adversely affected due to the underfunding of all the libraries, which makes them vulnerable to be sold off.
Because decisions about the selling of libraries are made in secret, it means that every New Yorker needs to wonder if his or her library is next on the list. Is it just Donnell, the Science and Industry Business Library, Mid-Manhattan, 42nd Street's Central Reference Library at Fifth Avenue, the Brooklyn Heights library incorporating Brooklyn's Business and Career Library and the historic Carnegie Pacific Branch that will be subject to sales and these significant shrinkages? How did those libraries end up on the chopping block? There was no public discussion. There was no oversight from the City Council. What is being decided behind closed doors impacts all our neighborhood and city-wide libraries.
It appears to be by design that the library administration wants to keep us in the dark about their plans. In true divide-and-conquer fashion library administration officials don't want you to know whether your library or another library that you care about will be next on the chopping block. The strategic plan for the Brooklyn Public Library in their own words says that the plan is to “leverage” (a fancy word for “sell”) all of the real estate. The BPL: “will leverage its over one million square feet of real estate by launching partnerships . . .” When the NYPL unveiled its system-wide real estate plans in March of 2008 which states a goal of having “fewer service points” to provide “better service to users” it envisions making changes in Northern Manhattan and Staten Island. In other words, they want to consolidate the libraries. This is the antithesis of the concept of the neighborhood library allowing for easy accessibility for all citizens to libraries.
In reality, anybody's library might not be too far down the list, but library officials rather you did not know if it is. One woman, while leafleting outside and canvassing against library sales was called inside by library administration officials to specifically tell her that her library was not being looked at for sale. This was contrary to what the real estate press said. In response, library officials told her that was just a developer with whom they had no connection taking initiative on their own. Nevertheless, that particular library was included in a list of libraries that at least one developer was given to look at for development in the summer of 2007.
Evidence shows that library administration officials don't tell the public which libraries they are looking at to sell until the very last minute as was seen with Donnell, Brooklyn Heights and the Pacific Branch.
In what looks like a divide-and-conquer strategy, one community is told that their own community library could receive money if someone else's library is sold, little caring about the accuracy of such representations. Residents of Dyker Heights are told (article: Library Vital to Immigrants Squeezed by City Budget, by: Norman Oder, June 18, 2013) that their McKinley Park branch could be renovated (implying it won't be sold) if libraries (like the Pacific Branch) in “gentrifying” neighborhoods are sold, and while residents of Fort Greene are told that proceeds from selling Pacific Street will partially pay for outfitting a new BAM South library. The truth is that the money received from the library sell-offs must go to the city general funds and there is no way to assure any funds will go to any of the libraries.
The library administration officials have publicly said their intent is to sell off the most valuable real estate first. But what is most valuable to a real estate developer is probably also the most valuable and irreplaceable to the public for much of the same reasons. It means that this looting of the system stands to do a lot of damage swiftly and up front. Once an asset is sold there is no reversing the damage it has done. Once the administration views the selling off of these assets as a success, they will continue to work their way down the list.
Because uncertainty of the future of a library's existence creates an unstable environment for the staff and the patrons of that library, it is imperative that the library administrators reveal to the public their short and long term plans for library restructuring. Exposing library sales in a piecemeal way prevents any oversight body and the public from analyzing in a comprehensive way the impact on all city residents of the end game of these sell-off plans.
Libraries are one of the most profound instruments of Democracy. We see these library reductions and shrinkages as part of the consistent erosion of all people's access to information and knowledge. These decisions are in the hands of a few men and women of great wealth and power who lack comprehension of the importance of neighborhood and other libraries. They have undisputed ties to the real estate industry. Their motives, based on their actions, are clearly not in the interest of the everyday man, woman and child.
Sincerely,
Citizens Defending Libraries
How Much Are Libraries Being Downsized and Library System Assets Shrunk?
March 11 2014
James G. Van Bramer, Chair
Committee on Cultural Affairs,
Libraries and International Intergroup Relations
250 Broadway
New York, NY 10017
Re: New York City Council Fiscal Year 2015 Preliminary Budget, Mayor's FY '14 Preliminary Management Report and Agency Oversight Hearings
Dear Committee:
With Donnell, the Central Library Plan and every library sell-off plan the details of which have actually seen the light of day, including the Brooklyn Heights library, there has been a consistent and substantial diminishment of the publicly owned assets (usually by 2/3rds to 3/4ths) with no benefit to the public while others are benefitting in nontransparent top-down concocted deals that, like Donnell, benefit connected players in the real estate industry.
• Donnell Library: Reduction of public library space by more than two-thirds (from 97,000 square feet to 28,000 square feet- NY Times figures, though by other calculation it is more extreme). A library worth perhaps $120 million to the public in terms of continued ownership (based on recent transactions) is sold to net $39 million!The proponents of these shrinking libraries will never refer to them as smaller. They will call them “state-of-the-art” and quibble, speaking about the spaces in terms other than apples-to-apples comparisons referring to `found space,’ `equivalent space’ and `flexible space,’ but the fact of the matter is that space will always have its value and publicly owned space is publicly owned space and publicly owned assets are publicly owned assets.
• Central Library Plan: Reduction of public library space by more than two-thirds or about three-quarters (from more than 380,000 square feet down to 80,000 square feet- That’s the 139,000 sq/ft Mid-Manhattan plus the 160,000 sq/ft SIBL plus the 80,000 sq/ft of stacks being destroyed. In the very recent past, before the real estate guys took over administering the libraries, it was proposed to nearly double Mid-Manhattan’s space, increasing it by 117,000 square feet for more library services). The cost of this more than 380,000 square foot shrinkage is $350 million or more. It is not paid for by the real estate sales because they bring in less than that amount (Marx referred to bringing in $300 million at least a $50 million loss). Another cost to the public?: Most of the recently built $100 million SIBL has been sold off for $60.8 million. Instead, the shrinkage is justified because it is asserted by Marx and the NYPL that a smaller library (with fewer librarians) might cost $15 million a year less to run. Most savings of this sort involve personnel cost reductions, not brick and mortar. (The libraries being destroyed are not just physical assets.)
• Brooklyn Heights Library: Reduction of public library space by more than two-thirds (from 62,000 square feet to 15,000 or maybe now 20,000 square feet). Cost benefit to the public this time? Not out yet, but it’s supposed to be a “partnership” arrangement rather than a request for bids arrangement and likely with Forest City Ratner with a record of abusing those relationships. (The no-bid arrangement for the BAM South library to "replace" the historic Pacific branch- hearings were Tuesday morning- started out as an RFP to build a "parking garage" which through partnership has become something extravagantly different and more generous for the developer.)
Sincerely,
Citizens Defending Libraries
Is The Downsizing of Libraries a "Right-sizing" or Possibly a Wrong-Sizing?
March 11 2014
James G. Van Bramer, Chair
Committee on Cultural Affairs,
Libraries and International Intergroup Relations
250 Broadway
New York, NY 10017
Re: New York City Council Fiscal Year 2015 Preliminary Budget, Mayor's FY '14 Preliminary Management Report and Agency Oversight Hearings
Dear Committee:
We are downsizing our libraries with these deals that turn libraries into real estate sales. Despite increasing library use we see substantial reductions with library space decreased to as little as one-third or less its previous size. Are we right-sizing the system? Have we really thought about what size our libraries should be, whether or how much they should actually be shrunk rather than grown and expanded?
Doesn’t it seem to be entirely too odd a coincidence that in the New York Public Library’s Central Library Plan it is estimated (calculated?) that ALL the library space of the libraries the NYPL has decided to sell, the 300,000 square feet of SIBL and Mid-Manhattan combined will just happen to fit (they say) in the 80,000 square feet of space where that plan proposes to eliminate the research stacks of the 42nd Street Central Reference Library? Is it really a coincidence or was the NYPL in doing these `calculations’ just working backward from the real estate it wants to sell? It appears so because when Citizens Defending Libraries met with NYPL Chief Operating Officer David Offsensend, Mr. Offsensend said that they do not yet have information about how many books they want to keep in the library when they finish planning.
What if this calculation of the space needed is wrong? Mr. Offensend said that if the space calculations of the Central Library Plan are wrong there is no way to expand and correct the space afterward. In addition, if there is a need for growth or expansion in the future there is no way to accommodate it with additional space in the future.
The previous plan for the Mid-Manhattan library, a recent one, in existence just ten years ago, was an expansion plan, an almost doubling of space, adding 117,000 square feet to the existing 139,000 square feet. Similarly recent plans for the Brooklyn Public Library existing within that same time frame (even a little bit more recently), called for a substantial addition of space with a new 150,000 square feet of library across from the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
If it was just so recently that we were increasing and expanding library space aren’t we now making a big mistake by shrinking space as drastically as with the Central Library Plan, which takes 380,000 square feet of library space shrinking it down to squeeze it in 80,000 square feet with no possibility of expansion afterward?
Sincerely,
Citizens Defending Libraries
We Need A "Cooling Off" Period, A Moratorium On Real Estate Sales: A Look At Alleged Repair Costs That Look Suspiciously Inflated
March 11 2014
James G. Van Bramer, Chair
Committee on Cultural Affairs,
Libraries and International Intergroup Relations
250 Broadway
New York, NY 10017
Re: New York City Council Fiscal Year 2015 Preliminary Budget, Mayor's FY '14 Preliminary Management Report and Agency Oversight Hearings
Dear Committee:
We are here to say yet again we need a “cooling off” period. . .
. . . We need a moratorium on the selling off of the library system’s best and most valuable assets until more is known about the questionable reasons being given for why the best real estate needs to be sold off to developers.
We need a “cooling off” period because every time they want to sell libraries, often recently renovated ones, they seem to find an insurmountable problem with the library’s air conditioning system. It’s highly suspicious!
Whenever library officials want to push a library out the door as a real estate deal they find air conditioning problems a handy complaint.
• The reason Donnell Library needed to be closed, sold and shrunk? An air conditioning problem! To sell a whole library? At a considerable loss to the public because the NYPL netted less than $39 million for the 97,000 square foot library? By way of reference, much of that library had been recently renovated, the auditorium, the Teen Center, and in November of 2001 a new 14,500 sq ft state-of-the-art media center paid for by the City and State of New York. That complete and extensive renovation included new air conditioning for about 15% of Donnell’s space. It cost $1 million. While that much of the building had been so recently renovated for so little (and other recent renovations of more space were in place) the NYPL provided cover for the announcement its announcement of Donnell’s sale in 2007 estimating that renovation of the rest of the building would cost $48 million!Highly suspicious. We need an audit!
• Why demolish the historic research book stack system at the Tilden Astor Central Reference Library at 42nd Street? According to the NYPL. . . An air conditioning problem!
• Need to sell off and shrink the Brooklyn Heights branch and Business and Career library? According to the BPL . . . .An air conditioning problem!
• Sell the historic Pacific Branch? An air conditioning problem! Want to sell off a lot of libraries in Brooklyn? Announce that a lot of them have air conditioning problems and start closing them in the summer! See: More libraries fall as heat nears 100 degrees, By Mary Frost, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 6, 2012.
The Brooklyn Public Library announced that it wanted to sell the Brooklyn Heights Library because of the condition of the air conditioning this January but the plan and decision to sell the library go back to at least 2008. The air conditioning breakdown that `couldn’t be fixed’ didn’t occur until summer, 2012, right in time to announce the library’s sale to the public.
Although the public was told that the air conditioning was the reason to sell the library in January of 2013, library administration and city officials withheld information about exactly what was supposedly wrong with the air conditioning until mid-June, days before an RFP (Request For Proposals) to sell the library (because of the “air conditioning”!) was sent out. The withheld information finally released was simply a July 12, 2012 DDC Construction Report but even then the requested cost estimates that had been cited in the press all along were still withheld. When these documents were requested from the Brooklyn Public Library they referred our representatives over to DDC (New York City Department of Design and Construction) and when the DDC was requested to give up these documents they referred our representatives back over to the BPL. To date they haven’t been produced.
In substitution therefor the BPL has produced another in a series of escalating estimates of the cost of repairing the air conditioning. A repair that was once estimated to cost $700,000 or substantially less went to $750,000 and from there to $3 million, then to $3.5 million. The official estimate has now recently escalated to between $4.5 and $5 million (and is apparently at odds with previous engineering assessments). You know that they are reaching to find costs because both the architect delivering the estimate and Brooklyn Public Library spokesperson are saying that one of the hard-to-meet challenges in fixing the system is all the heat that modern-day computers are throwing off. These modern-day computers are also being blamed by the BPL for making the library too expensive to repair in another way: It would be far too expensive to supply them with the electricity they need!
Further, the most recent estimate, disingenuous on its face, calls for fixing air conditioning that isn’t broken and for air conditioning more space than actually required.
We need an audit and we need a “cooling off” period until that audit is completed and the mind-set of library and city officials is no longer one that prioritizes creating real estate deals for developers! Remember: These breakdowns accompanied by inflated repair estimates only came after the decision to the sell the library.
Sincerely,
Citizens Defending Libraries
The Problem of Offering `Credible' Assurance That Money Given To The Libraries Will Be Properly Used
March 11 2014
James G. Van Bramer, Chair
Committee on Cultural Affairs,
Libraries and International Intergroup Relations
250 Broadway
New York, NY 10017
Re: New York City Council Fiscal Year 2015 Preliminary Budget, Mayor's FY '14 Preliminary Management Report and Agency Oversight Hearings
Dear Committee:
Many of us have given money to the libraries intending to see our donations benefit the system. Citizens Defending Libraries has also called for more taxpayer money for the libraries, an end to underfunding at a time of substantially increasing library use and city growth.
Unfortunately, giving to support the libraries has now become a perplexing problem for donors in more ways than one.
At City Council Budget hearings on Monday, June 3rd of last year Anthony W. Marx and Linda Johnson, the respective heads of the New York Public Library and the Brooklyn Public Library, testified that they had a problem approaching donors asking that they give monies to fund the libraries because they cannot make a `credible’ case that any money given to the libraries by such donors will not be immediately subtracted out by the Mayor of New York in budget cuts. Indeed, nearly everyone seems to acknowledge the harm of the annual city budget dance around library funding and how it involves cynical gamesmanship.
There is another significant problem in approaching potential donors to the NYPL and BPL that Marx and Johnson did not talk about but which is just as significant, probably much more so: The library heads cannot make a `credible’ case that generous gifts given to the libraries by generous public-spirited donors will not be subtracted out in the form of real estate deals that squander or plunder generous gifts given to the libraries.
John D. Rockefeller gave the land at 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenue, across from the Museum of Modern Art for the building of the Donnell Library. Ezekiel Donnell paid for the building of the five-story library 97,000 square foot building there. Over the years many other others donated to further improve that library, funds that included the investment of taxpayer dollars for state-of-the-art facilities. Did Rockefeller, Donnell or any of us suspect that the assets bequeathed the public would be virtually given away netting less than a mere $39 million, less than two-thirds of what the 7,381 square foot penthouse in the 50-story building replacing Donnell is being marketed for?
Similarly, the Central Library Plan involves a careless and very expensive discard of public space and assets, probably a net financial loss for the NYPL, a gross reduction of more than 380,000 square feet of library space squeezed down into only 80,000 square feet counting the elimination of the 42nd Street Reference Library’s research stacks. SIBL, completed in 1996 for $100 million, has been quietly, and nearly entirely (87%), sold off for $60.8 million. The BPL is now following suit with similar plans of sell-offs for real estate deals.
What then became of our donations and public expenditures? Those giving money to the libraries, whether regularly in the past or those wanting to in the future are loath to see our gifts squandered and thus made meaningless. In addition to donated funds, much of what is being squandering or plundered came from the taxpayers. There needs to be accountability to assure that all these monies will be used as, and in the spirit of, what was intended. There should be investigation, and new and better assurances are in order.
Sincerely,
Citizens Defending Libraries
Problematic Mind-Set of Library Trustees
March 11 2014
James G. Van Bramer, Chair
Committee on Cultural Affairs,
Libraries and International Intergroup Relations
250 Broadway
New York, NY 10017
Re: New York City Council Fiscal Year 2015 Preliminary Budget, Mayor's FY '14 Preliminary Management Report and Agency Oversight Hearings
Dear Committee:
We need to investigate. We as taxpayers pay the lion's share of the library budgets but the libraries are run by trustees with a mind-set we cannot trust.
Brooklyn Public Library CEO Linda Johnson said that Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein is her idea of an ideal board member for her library system board. That is indicative of a terrible mind-set on her part.
Mr. Blankfein is exactly the kind of board member one could expect to get behind real estate deals that shrink libraries while craftily conferring more benefits upon the wealthy and connected. Mr. Blankfein’s Goldman Sachs took advantage of special relationships and maneuvering to procure unique real estate benefits, design overrides and subsidies for its new corporate headquarters in Battery Park City. It was written about in the New York Times. Mr. Blankfein is also a proponent of the notion that the public needs to lower its expectations about entitlements that he firmly says “they're not going to get.”
What better candidate to help plunder the libraries’ public real estate assets for the benefit of a wealthy few?
At the same time, the biggest real estate sell-off and shrinkage of Manhattan’s main libraries (the Donnell library and the three premier libraries more formally a part of the NYPL “Central Library Plan”) is unfolding, Stephen A. Schwarzman is on the board of the NYPL pushing such deals for the real estate industry? Why?
Mr. Schwarzman is the Blackstone Group. That’s one of the biggest real estate companies around. If you were watching PBS in June, Charlie Rose was helping Mr. Schwarzman with a lot of boasts about Blackstone:
Rose: . . . it is now the world's largest alternative investment firm with over $200 billion under management.Schwarzman runs seven lines of business under Blackstone generating huge possibilities for conflicts of interest, including hedge funds. Hedge funds are notorious these days for making a lot of money. Schwarzman says his private equity business is bigger:
* * * *
Rose: I think you're the largest real estate investor in the world, aren't you?
Schwarzman: That's true. (Nodding)
* * * *
Schwarzman: We are the largest investors in the world in hedge funds.
Schwarzman: … Private equity is a bigger business… The rates on return on private equity tend to be much higher.At the same time that Mr. Schwarzman is apparently making lots of money at Blackstone, a fair amount connected to real estate, the New York Public library seems to be transacting a series of real estate deals like Donnell, SIBL and the Central Library Plan that are very bad for the public.
Is Mr. Schwarzman interested in the public’s benefit or his own? Mr. Schwarzman apparently considers himself to be part of a societal class war, and believes that if the uneven playing field advantages that favor the .01 percent at the expense of the rest of us are jeopardized by, for instance, a proposal to eliminate the carried-interest loophole (which allows executives at firms like Blackstone to pay only 15 percent taxes on much of their income), that it’s an intolerable setback. He declared: “It's a war; it's like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.”
Did Mr. Schwarzman’s consider that his name was being put on a boondoggle when it was put on the Tilden Astor Central Reference Library at 42nd Street which will be destroyed as a reference library under the Central Library Plan shrinkage and sell-off plan. He told Charlie Rose when he transferred $100 million to effect the name change that he knew those plans and how the money would be spent.
We need an investigation. We need an audit. We cannot trust trustees who think with such a different mid-set to guard our precious publicly paid for library assets.
Sincerely,
Citizens Defending Libraries
Library Officials Keeping Librarians Quiet. What About?: Getting Rid Of Books And Policies Of Shrinkage That Don't Make Sense
March 11 2014
James G. Van Bramer, Chair
Committee on Cultural Affairs,
Libraries and International Intergroup Relations
250 Broadway
New York, NY 10017
Re: New York City Council Fiscal Year 2015 Preliminary Budget, Mayor's FY '14 Preliminary Management Report and Agency Oversight Hearings
Dear Committee:
Library administration officials don’t want to hear what librarians have to say. They also don’t want the public to hear what librarians have to say.
Did you know that:
• In 2009 the NYPL started having departing librarians sign “nondisparagement agreements.” They were written about in the New York Times where one departing librarian refusing to take money to sign the agreement referred to it as “hush money.” (See: New York Times: Employees Feel Silenced on Library Project, by Robin Pogrebin, May 23, 2012.) Many librarians are being fired these days so that, with their leaving the oral history of what we have historically intended our libraries to be is also leaving.What is it that library administration officials are concerned librarians might be communicating about were they not thus silenced and intimidated? Librarians could be telling the public about:
• Library administration officials have pursued librarians still working at the libraries, seeking to have them sign similar documents (loyalty oaths).
• NYPL administration officials ended the ROAR program, a program where retired librarians could come back and work (without benefits) on an hourly basis at a reduced cost to the system.
• Whatever reason officials might give for ending the ROAR, fewer former librarians are present in the library environment, and officials have now gone a step further by banning former librarians from volunteering at the libraries, something any other member of the public is free to do.
• The number of librarians that have been laid off and fired is at an all time high.
• In addition, there has been a huge amount of shifting librarians around between libraries. Such shifting can limit the ability of librarians to know about their libraries and can be used as a tool to stifle criticism. {What was it that now allows libraries of a certain status to be transferred to the Bronx- that they are no longer union?)
• Librarians haven been transferred and/or encouraged to retire not because of their own opposition to what is being done at the libraries (like the sale of Donnell and elimination of books), but because staff working for them have expressed dissatisfaction with some of these sorts of things.
• Librarians have been told not to discuss or give out information about library “renovations.”
• Libraries now run by “site managers” (a real estate sounding description) rather than “head librarians.”
• Programs of book removal and shrinkage. Did you know that NYPL librarians have been given directives from senior officials:If librarians could talk, they could tell the public what it might want to know about the way libraries should be. It should be against public policy to silence librarians and they shouldn’t be abused for exercising their free speech rights in this of all environments! Aren’t libraries where we are supposed to be able to go for knowledge and truth?
• That bookshelves should always be less than 50% full.• Books are being thrown out in middle of night
• That shelves should never have more than two copies of the same book. Not even Hamlet!
• That books that are “shabby” in appearance should be thrown out? So-called “shabby” looking books just might be limited edition or out-of-print books
• Librarians might tell people how very well used and popular libraries being closed down or shrunk like Donnell were.
• Librarians might have something to say about what it means to send books away to less accessible off-site locations.
• Librarians might notice and point out when valuable assets at the library go missing? Did you know:
• Bibliographies representing years of work by librarians intended to be ready to assist the public are being thrown out?
• The New York Times donated a substantial portion of its morgue to the NYPL? It organized research in a way modern day computers don’t duplicate. It was once kept in the Annex? Does anyone know where it is now and that it wasn’t thrown away?
Sincerely,
Citizens Defending Libraries
The Lack of Reality Concerning The “Public Involvement” Library Officials Tout
 |
| BPL President Linda Johnson who got to extol the quality of `public involvement' in the sell-off of the Brooklyn Heights Library when asked a softball question at the September 30, 2013 City Council Hearing on library sell-offs that sounded prearranged |
BPL President Linda Johnson: The most imminent project that we are working on is the Brooklyn Heights Library and we’ve been very open about our plans from the first steps. And we’ve established a community action committee which meets regularly that is comprised of members of community organizations as well as representatives of elected representatives and representatives themselves and this idea really is to get a sense from the community about what the library should be, how it should function, how it should play a role in the community, and ultimately, when we get there, what the library should look like.March 11 2014
James G. Van Bramer, Chair
Committee on Cultural Affairs,
Libraries and International Intergroup Relations
250 Broadway
New York, NY 10017
Re: New York City Council Fiscal Year 2015 Preliminary Budget, Mayor's FY '14 Preliminary Management Report and Agency Oversight Hearings
Dear Committee:
The public process for selling off New York City libraries, such as it exists, is confusing, deceptive and intentionally frustrating to those wishing to, in any way oppose, or question the wisdom of, selling off libraries, shrinking them, or underfunding them as a prelude to such sell-offs.
For instance:
• You hear alternately from those such as Brooklyn Public Library Spokesperson Josh Nachowitz or the Friends of the Brooklyn Heights Branch Library that:Libraries are far too important to society to so trivialize and manipulate the attention that must be paid if and when a library is ever proposed to be sold.
• The sale of the Brooklyn Heights Library is a “done deal” so that it is futile to oppose it, andIndeed, it is discouraging to hear that the decision to sell the library was made way back, at least as far back as 2008 but that long-held secret decision is not to be the subject of public review or criticism until years later.
• There will be a process in which the public can oppose the sale of the library in the future so it is not appropriate or worthwhile to oppose that sale at this time.
• Meanwhile, those such as Josh Nachowitz and the Friends group conduct what purports to be a form of public process, convening something called the “Community Advisory Committee” (CAC). It is called the “Community Advisory Committee” although it is chaired by Mr. Nachowitz and Deborah Hallen of the Friends Group, who has circulated guidance she apparently considers her group bound by that says the so-called “Friends” group cannot do anything except support the BPL in its goals completely and totally. In what way can the “Friends” group ever hope to represent the community if it cannot oppose the BPL in any way: can’t oppose the sale, can’t oppose the shrinkage, can’t demand a bigger temporary library, can’t request longer hours, can’t even request that the new library have a book drop? Additionally insulting to the public: The other group appointed to represent it as the CAC was originally constituted was the Brooklyn Heights Association, which was informing us, “the Brooklyn Heights Association is simply supporting the position of the librarians and the Friends of the Library.”
• It was clearly indicated to Citizens Defending Libraries in discussions we had on the subject that those setting up the CAC and designing its operations, including the Brooklyn Borough President’s office, considered it inappropriate for Citizens Defending Libraries to be represented on the CAC, despite its much more significant community support (the fast-falling membership of the Friends group was below 200), because Citizens Defending Libraries opposed the sale and shrinkage of the library. In other words, the very limited and circumscribed purpose of the CAC was to support the procession toward a contract with a developer for sale and shrinkage of the library before the end of the Bloomberg administration.
Sincerely,
Citizens Defending Libraries
Investigation of AstroTurf, Impropriety of Using Public Funds To Create Appearance of Support For Real Estate Development Projects
March 11 2014
James G. Van Bramer, Chair
Committee on Cultural Affairs,
Libraries and International Intergroup Relations
250 Broadway
New York, NY 10017
Re: New York City Council Fiscal Year 2015 Preliminary Budget, Mayor's FY '14 Preliminary Management Report and Agency Oversight Hearings
Dear Committee:
Did you know our current State Attorney General’s office has made headlines with what is referred to as its “AstroTurf War,” its “Operation Clean Turf,” wherein that office is investigating and combating companies that fraudulently represent the consumer community by writing fake positive reviews for the products of companies that pay them to do so. The AG may have, in this regard, slightly expanded the original definition of AstroTurf which refers to fake grassroots organizations that pretend to represent the community, but AstroTurf groups are a truly a significant problem. That said, the public ought to investigate and assess the extent to which different groups supporting the sale of libraries partake of the characteristics of AstroTurf.
Should AstroTurf activities be considered illegal, be investigated and prosecuted? The Attorney General has in the past acted against New York City development agencies like the Economic Development Corporation for illegally flowing taxpayer money into lobbying activities and public-hearing-support activities through groups like Local Development Corporations. When library administration officials transform their organizations into real estate operations and then flow the taxpayer money they receive out to AstroTurf activity, is it really a very different thing? No matter what, it is an undesirable use of taxpayer money that should be stopped.
A recent new chapter in this story: February 26, 2014, The Brooklyn Public Library sent a “lobbying day” bus to Albany. Consider that this bus was ultimately paid for by the taxpayers. The BPL was extending invitations to the public to come aboard and ask for fund, but it pulled back on that invitation when it realized that it did not want going to Albany those members of the public who would ask for funding of the libraries so that insufficient funding could not be cited as a pretext for selling libraries.
These matters are something to which the City Council needs to direct its attention and investigate. When the Council does it will find that it is happening.
Sincerely,
Citizens Defending Libraries
Coincidences? The Mayor's Deliberate Underfunding of Libraries The NYPL's Selling Of Libraries And The BPL's Selling Of Libraries Are All Unfolding Synchronously?
March 11 2014
James G. Van Bramer, Chair
Committee on Cultural Affairs,
Libraries and International Intergroup Relations
250 Broadway
New York, NY 10017
Re: New York City Council Fiscal Year 2015 Preliminary Budget, Mayor's FY '14 Preliminary Management Report and Agency Oversight Hearings
Dear Committee:
Are we dealing with coincidences or are we dealing with planned and coordinated actions? There are those who would like to excuse the Bloomberg administration’s deliberate, extreme underfunding of New York City’s libraries and deem it not to be associated with the currently proposed sell-offs of the city libraries that are consequently short on funds, saying that it must, instead, be a coincidence that the two are happening at the same time.
Is it a coincidence that the New York Public Library and the Brooklyn Public Library are both selling off and shrinking libraries at the same time? That both the NYPL and the BPL started planing these sales at the same time and are now both pressing such deals forward, rushing them along at the end of the Bloomberg administration? Is it a coincidence that the current extreme underfunding of city libraries began as the plans for these real estate sell-offs got underway?
According to the NYPL’s Chief Operating Officer, David Offensend, the NYPL began looking at doing its Central Library Plan in 2006 or perhaps as early as 2005. The NYPL had the sell-off and shrinkage plans previewed and blessed by the Bloomberg administration in June of 2007. The BPL was having real estate developers look at multiple city-owned properties for development at least as early as the summer of 2007. In the fall of 2007 the NYPL suddenly announced that Donnell Library had been sold. Even if the public hadn’t been told there must have been a little planning of this in advance! Similarly, although the public was also not told, the BPL decided as of 2008 that evicting the Business and Career Library from its Downtown Brooklyn home in the Brooklyn Heights Library would allow that library to be sold and shrunk like Donnell.
Mayor Bloomberg, a candidate for a third term, attended the March 11, 2008 press conference where the NYPL announced plans that would entail changes to its real estate holdings although listening to the public relations statements of the time one would have had to be psychic (or a student of the Donnell debacle) to realize that what was being talked about was a shrinkage of the system and a shedding of valuable assets for far less than their value. Thereupon, the reelected Bloomberg promptly starved the libraries, each year cutting their funding back more.
Coincidences? We don’t think so. And they ought not to be treated as such.
Sincerely,
Citizens Defending Libraries
The Top-Down Plotted Library Sell-offs, Lack Transparency and Accountability
March 11 2014
James G. Van Bramer, Chair
Committee on Cultural Affairs,
Libraries and International Intergroup Relations
250 Broadway
New York, NY 10017
Re: New York City Council Fiscal Year 2015 Preliminary Budget, Mayor's FY '14 Preliminary Management Report and Agency Oversight Hearings
Dear Committee:
As a new Center For An Urban Future report on library funding and usage points out, the “libraries depend on the city for the lion's share of their budgets” but “they are technically independent 501(c)(3) entities, not government agencies.” The anomalous result is that while we as taxpayers are funding the library system those running the system are busy selling off its assets, crown jewels first, without accountability or transparency, in deals that create enormous private benefit for the elite of this city.
This was pointed out in 2008 in an editorial by the editor-in-chief of Library Journal after the sale of the Donnell library. That library, now only a construction site, was sold after recent, expensive, city and state-funded renovations, with the intention of shrinking it down to less than one-third size, a library that will now be mostly underground and sadly bookless. Those who got the real estate are putting up a high-end hotel and luxury condominiums.
There were all sorts of questions about the location of some of the collections with the breakup of the collections diminishing the role of Donnell as a central library. The decisions were communicated to staff (and in the case of Donnell, to the public) almost entirely after the big decisions have been made.
It was wrong for the New York Public Library, a public/private entity funded mostly by the taxpayers, to blithely sidestep public and staff input with respect to Donnell and now library trustees are doing it again as libraries throughout the system are being put on the chopping block. Look at the Central Library Plan in Manhattan. Look at what is going on in Brooklyn where a BPL “strategic plan” puts every piece of the system’s real estate into play.
When Donnell was sold the City Council’s Libraries Subcommittee chair didn't know about the Donnell sale ahead of time even though he said it was “troubling” in terms of “the whole mission of the library.”
Now Donnell and that lack of transparency and that lack of accountability is being used as a model everywhere in the city. Taxpayers fund the libraries and these plans need to be audited and brought into the daylight.
Sincerely,
Citizens Defending Libraries
Testimony of Donald Christensen Evaluating Real Estate Interest Issues Affecting Central Library Plan Partly In the Light of Previously Respected Trustee and Public Policy
March 11 2014
James G. Van Bramer, Chair
Committee on Cultural Affairs,
Libraries and International Intergroup Relations
250 Broadway
New York, NY 10017
Re: New York City Council Fiscal Year 2015 Preliminary Budget, Mayor's FY '14 Preliminary Management Report and Agency Oversight Hearings
Dear Committee:
Thursday, June 27, 2013, Assembly Member Micah Kellner, Chair of the Committee on Libraries and Education Technology, held a public hearing at 250 Broadway in Manhattan on the sale of New York City library buildings to private developers. Donald Christensen, a professional researcher delivered startling testimony at that hearing. It is highly relevant to this hearing, but Mr. Christensen contacted us to let us know he could not be here today.
Accordingly, we are submitting that testimony on his behalf in the form it appeared, republished in full, in the attached Noticing New York article: Tuesday, July 2, 2013, Startling Testimony at State Assembly Hearing on NYC Library Sales. His testimony is also viewable at the New York State Assembly site and on YouTube the link to it being available in that Noticing New York article.
Sincerely,
Citizens Defending Libraries
Lack of Public Benefit From Proposed Brooklyn Heights Sale Because of Previous Transfer of Development Rights To Forest City Ratner
March 11 2014
James G. Van Bramer, Chair
Committee on Cultural Affairs,
Libraries and International Intergroup Relations
250 Broadway
New York, NY 10017
Re: New York City Council Fiscal Year 2015 Preliminary Budget, Mayor's FY '14 Preliminary Management Report and Agency Oversight Hearings
Dear Committee:
A Request for Proposals has been issued by Bloomberg administration officials working with Brooklyn Public Library officials to sell The Brooklyn Heights Library.
Ostensibly, that library, a significant and important capital asset for the public, is being sold and shrunk to raise dollars for the BPL’s capital budget. There is of course the problem that any sale proceeds would not go to the BPL, but to the city, because it is the city that owns the library. Setting that aside, there is a bigger problem that was not mentioned to the public or to the elected officials theoretically being informed about and overseeing the transaction: There is very little left to net any proceeds for the pubic because in 1986 most of the 10 FAR development rights were transferred out to Forest City Ratner. Even worse, analysis indicates that, if the library were sold, most of the benefit, perhaps even most of the sale proceeds, would be going to Forest City Ratner, not the public.
And yet, in promoting this transaction library and city administration officials felt they could keep this information under wraps and out of the equation.
The attached Noticing New York article covers this topic in more detail than three minutes of testimony can: Friday, September 20, 2013, Forest City Ratner As The Development Gatekeeper (And Profit taker) Getting The Benefit As Brooklyn Heights Public Library Is Sold.
Sincerely,
Citizens Defending Libraries
Another Privatization Of Publicly Owned Property and Public Realm Associated With Digitizing Public Collections
March 11 2014
James G. Van Bramer, Chair
Committee on Cultural Affairs,
Libraries and International Intergroup Relations
250 Broadway
New York, NY 10017
Re: New York City Council Fiscal Year 2015 Preliminary Budget, Mayor's FY '14 Preliminary Management Report and Agency Oversight Hearings
Dear Committee:
While many of us are well aware that these proposed library sell-offs represent real estate deals that privatize publicly-owned assets there is another associated concern about privatization that should not be overlooked. Library officials talking about getting rid of books are at the same time discussing digitizing and relying on digital content sometime in the future even if their plans are not yet ready for prime time).
But we must be wary that there are many who see the digitized future in terms of an increasingly privatized future where corporations pushing for various plans expect to make a lot of money
by controlling digitized information, in many cases, by charging the public for what's already owned by the public in public collections that are being put out of reach.
Many consider that this was the principal motivation behind the sickening 1995 hollowing-out of the San Francisco Public Library collections, which was underwritten with big-ticket contributions from telecoms and Silicon Valley.
Digital activist Aaron Swartz warned about this disturbing trend:
The world’s entire scientific ... heritage ... is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations....The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it.In the future we may expect that after the libraries have contracted out to privatize content we will be charged exorbitantly high fees for what was once publicly owned. The further irony in all of this is that much of the transcription and other work to create digitally available content may have been crowd sourced so that the public will be charged for what it once freely owned and for the result of its own freely contributed work product and intensive labor creating privatized content.
Sincerely,
Citizens Defending Libraries
With Errant Visions of Digital Utopia Do We Now Get A Digital Dystopia?
March 11 2014
James G. Van Bramer, Chair
Committee on Cultural Affairs,
Libraries and International Intergroup Relations
250 Broadway
New York, NY 10017
Re: New York City Council Fiscal Year 2015 Preliminary Budget, Mayor's FY '14 Preliminary Management Report and Agency Oversight Hearings
Dear Committee:
Those who would tell you that we are now arriving at a digitally-supplied version of a utopic future where having libraries or physical books is no longer important are naive or dishonest.
Here is what Citizens Defending Libraries explained in answer to a question in an interview article published by Melville House (Citizens Defending Libraries calls the Central Library Plan “a real estate grab” and “contrary to the public interest”, by Claire Kelly, February 19, 2014 - Copy of full article attached)
Are you concerned that libraries are moving towards privatization and that there is a move to replace physical books with digital resources?When the Brooklyn Heights Association asked internet guru Clay Shirky to speak at its annual meeting on February 27th , Mr. Shirky said that we need libraries, acknowledging that there are great gaps in the knowledge and information that can be found on the internet and much that isn’t digitalized. Further, information available electronically can be unstable and ephemeral. More on this is available in the following Noticing New York article which is also attached: Wednesday, March 5, 2014, Internet Guru Clay Shirky Speaking At Brooklyn Heights Association Annual Meeting Says We Need Libraries Because Of Holes In The Internet.
We are very concerned about notions proposed that libraries should have to pay their own way or start bowing to corporate or other private interests. Libraries are an essential public commons, and should continue as such.
The issue of ownership is a good segue into the second part of your question. There is much evolving right now with respect to digital rights that hasn’t been resolved: Copyrights are being extended and made stricter; so-called “orphan works” are in serious jeopardy; content providers are consolidating into monopolies that raise prices while much of what is available digitally is made available through time-limited subscriptions that have a potential ephemerality that never applied to books on the shelves. Technology busily shifts too: The New York Times had a sentence in a tech section article recently, “If you own a Nook, the fate of your books may now be up in the air.”
We favor, and we are not against, adding digital resources, but right now we think that the benefits of digitization, partly fad, and partly, to an extent, legitimate future, are being seized upon and exaggerated to excuse a rush to get rid of physical books because books take up real estate and the focus of too many people running the libraries is selling real estate. The public, all of its generations, like physical books. For the most part the public hasn’t switched away from physical books. Scientific American just did an interesting review of the science literature indicating that the human brain may be hard-wired to learn and retain information better with physical books. Many books aren’t available digitally. Making them available would be a massive undertaking at which it is easy to fail. Nicholson Baker’s “Doublefold” and his tales of the unutterable destruction that occurred at San Francisco’s library provide serious cautionary tales. It doesn’t serve to banish books in a precipitous experiment undertaken by people with questionable motives who lack library credentials. Working for a hedge fund doesn’t qualify you to curate mankind’s store of knowledge.
NYPL President Tony Marx reads a physical copy of the New York Times, so do I, and that‘s the way I read many books. Physical media shouldn’t be the exclusive preserve of a lucky privileged few.
Jane Jacobs, the great urbanist thinker, suggested that society’s future answers, strengths and real development will almost certainly be developed organically, diversely, bottom up, not top-down. Importantly, such solutions to the future include what we need to know about and consider doing, with respect to many important issues facing us, including climate change. Unfortunately, in our rush to dismantle libraries, throwing away books, we are also destroying and putting beyond reach mankind’s store of knowledge on these matters. Jane Jacobs’ books cannot be found in Brooklyn’s libraries! Climate change information has vanished. More on this is available in the following Noticing New York article which is also attached: Tuesday, February 11, 2014, Libraries And Climate Change: The Dangerous Destruction of Information We May Need To Know To Survive.
Unless we are careful stewards of our resources the envisioning of a digital utopia may usher in the opposite, a dystopic future, a new dark age, where much of humankind’s knowledge is lost, much like the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria.
Sincerely,
Citizens Defending Libraries