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| Citizens Defending Libraries March 8th rally outside City Council's offices. Photo by Jonathan Barkey. Click to enlarge. |
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The following is the testimony given from Citizens Defending Libraries about budget issues related to New York City's libraries (after CDL's rally) at the March 8, 2013 hearings on:
New York City Council Fiscal Year 2014 Preliminary Budget, Mayor’s FY ‘13 Preliminary Management Report and Agency Oversight.
The hearing was run by James G. Van Bramer, Committee on Cultural Affairs, Libraries and International Relations.
Bowing to time constraints, only three representatives of the Citizens Defending Libraries contingent there to testify at the meeting actually testified orally, presenting the first three letters of testimony below together with some extemporized remarks taking into account earlier events at the hearing. The presenters were Carolyn E. McIntyre, Michael D. D. White and Judi Francis, in that order. The other statements appearing below were handed in at the hearing in writing.
Keep reading for information at the end about additional testimony by the
Committee to Save The New York Public Library.
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Citizens Defending Libraries testimony about to be delivered
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March 8, 2013
James G. Van Bramer, Chair
Committee on Cultural Affairs,
Libraries and International Relations
250 Broadway, Committe Rm 14th Fl
New York, NY 10017
Re: New York City Council Fiscal Year 2014 Preliminary Budget, Mayor’s FY ‘13 Preliminary Management Report and Agency Oversight Hearings
Dear Committee:
I became aware of the attempts to close and sell my library branch, the Brooklyn Heights branch, a month ago at a community meeting at the Brooklyn Heights library. Our branch is a very well used and loved branch.
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.
A study, by the Center For An Urban Future, out this January, tells us usage over of our libraries has gone up 40%, circulations 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 everyday.
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, shrink this branch? It makes no sense.
Carolyn McMillian said she mainly used the library to use the computer. She said when her son was deployed to Iraq the use of the computer at the library was the only way to keep in touch with him. It was their lifeline.
I started a petition after the meeting to stop the public policy of defunding libraries in order to sell the real estate to private developers. We have over 8,000 signatures and you can easily find Citizens Defending Libraries on the web.
At a another meeting a week ago run by Josh Nacowitz
, Mr. Nacowitz told me:
What's in your petition really speaks to what we are trying to do here. It's actually hugely helpful and it's part of the message we've been trying to deliver to the city for years and years and years. [except that during most of those years he was still working for the mayor defunding the libraries at the city’s real estate development agency] We face huge budget cuts every year. . . . We would all love that your petition would be hugely successful and we'll get the mayor and the administration to seek changes to the way they look at funding libraries. It would solve a lot of this.
In other words, if the libraries were properly funded they wouldn’t have to be sold to real estate developers who are friends with the mayor.
These libraries are loved, used and cherished more than ever. The numbers back that up.
We are either moving towards a more caring society or away from a caring society. Citizens Defending Libraries is watching you. Are you listening to us?
Sincerely,
Carolyn E. McIntyre
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March 8, 2013
James G. Van Bramer, Chair
Committee on Cultural Affairs,
Libraries and International Relations
250 Broadway, Committee Rm 14th Fl
New York, NY 10017
Re: New York City Council Fiscal Year 2014 Preliminary Budget, Mayor’s FY ‘13 Preliminary Management Report and Agency Oversight Hearings
Dear Committee:
Do we want a shrinking library system for a growing, wealthier city? That’s what we are getting as the principal purpose of the library system becomes the generation of real estate opportunities for developers. This new city-wide policy has, in a very harmful way, turned into a perverse incentive for the city to defund libraries and drive them into the ground.
That libraries are underfunded is without doubt: “More people visited public libraries in New York than every major sports team and every major cultural institution combined.” The funding of libraries is one of the highest priorities of the city’s community boards. And yet libraries do not receive funding anything like, for instance, the massive subsides we channel to Yankee Stadium or the so-called “Barclays” Bruce Ratner/Mikhail Prokhorov arena.
With all due respect, and I will leave it to you to decide how much respect is due, the process of the annual funding dance for libraries in this city is a farce that cannot be allowed to go on for even one more year. In Noticing New York I have lifted the veil: We know that insiders are referring to it as “dwarf tossing.” . . .
. . . Libraries are the little guys. They are a pittance that should be easy to include in the city budget, especially given that the money goes far since libraries are so well used. Everybody will care about libraries as their funding fate is cruelly tossed around in an annual battle that serves as political distraction. The political theater is that the big bad mayor cuts libraries and in the end the City Council and Borough Presidents ride in like heroes with discretionary funds to make up
some, but only
some, of the cuts. In the end we are funding our well-used libraries at such a low level we keep them open even less than Detroit, a city on the verge of bankruptcy.
Meanwhile, the mayor is getting what he wants: The low funding is being used as an excuse to push the system’s valuable assets out the door to real estate developers in crony capitalization abuse. You are funding this asset stripping by the mayor.
The greatest shame of underfunding the libraries in order to create real estate deals is that, even if it shakes loose a few real estate deals, maybe a few every year, it is an utter travesty to continually drive all libraries and the entire system into the ground financially.
Sincerely,
Michael D. D. White
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March 8, 2013
James G. Van Bramer, Chair
Committee on Cultural Affairs,
Libraries and International Relations
250 Broadway, Committee Rm 14th Fl
New York, NY 10017
Re: New York City Council Fiscal Year 2014 Preliminary Budget, Mayor’s FY ‘13 Preliminary Management Report and Agency Oversight Hearings
Dear Committee:
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 the libraries 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!
• Why demolish the historic research book stack system at the Tilden Astor Central Reference Library at 42nd Street? An air conditioning problem!
• Need to sell off and shrink the Brooklyn Heights branch and Business and Career library? 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, September 1, 2012.
Highly suspicious. We need an audit! The BPL hasn’t released any of its bid documents respecting the Brooklyn Heights air conditioning problems, is stonewalling on the release of minutes pertaining to public meetings that relate to the issue and there is every reason to believe that the cost and difficulty of fixing the air conditioning in the Brooklyn Heights branch is being grossly overstated.
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!
Sincerely,
Citizens Defending Libraries
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March 8, 2013
James G. Van Bramer, Chair
Committee on Cultural Affairs,
Libraries and International Relations
250 Broadway, Committe Rm 14th Fl
New York, NY 10017
Re: New York City Council Fiscal Year 2014 Preliminary Budget, Mayor’s FY ‘13 Preliminary Management Report and Agency Oversight Hearings
Dear Committee:
Josh Nachowitz, the Brooklyn Public Library’s VP of Government and Community Relations, said that the BPL said something misleading in a community meeting this week. The meeting was organized by City Council Member Steve Levin and related to the proposed sell-offs of libraries out of the city system, and most particularly the historic Pacific Branch library as one of the very first the Brooklyn Public Library would sell.
Nachowitz said the BPL was selling libraries to bring money into the library system.
To say that funds from a sale, even some of them, would go to the library system is highly misleading.
First, because the city owns the property, the funds from a sale would go to the city, not the library system. There is no existing enforceable agreement that any money would go to the libraries. A decision was made to sell libraries
before there was any basis to say that some or how much money might be given to the libraries. That should be an embarrassment to the Bloomberg/library officials who are flogging these deals because it means selling the real estate is their first and likely only real priority. . . .
not doing what is best for the libraries.
Library officials are now cognizant of the incongruities in the story they were telling because of such things as coverage in Noticing New York. On Tuesday night, for the very first time, they stated that they had reached an agreement in principle to get some money back from the city. That agreement is still not signed (they said it would be in the form of an MOU) and not publicly released or vetted. In fact, because money is fungible (and Bloomberg officials have already demonstrated they want to keep underfunding the libraries to create more of these real estate deals) it is impossible to structure an agreement where the city does not simply take back with one hand what it gives with other.
Tuesday night at Councilman Levin’s meeting the community heard Mr. Nachowitz say that the city would likely flow back some identifiable funds to the library system based on what it would cost to build replacement libraries (the Brooklyn Heights library and the Donnell library are both examples of how the replacement libraries are a
fraction of the size of libraries being replaced) but that library officials don’t even know what these costs and amounts might be. Would there be money in addition to that? No promise was heard that it would go to the libraries. Don’t bet on it.
Bottom line: This is not about getting money for the libraries. It is about getting real estate deals out to developers. And to do that, they are actually intentionally underfunding the libraries at an unprecedented level to create plausible cover.
Brooklyn Public Library spokesman Josh Nachowitz also confirmed this week that the BPL’s priority is to move the highest valued real estate out the door first. That means that by pursuing these wrong priorities they intend to do as much damage in selling off the most of the valuable system assets up front and as fast as they can.
Sincerely,
Citizens Defending Libraries
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March 8, 2013
James G. Van Bramer, Chair
Committee on Cultural Affairs,
Libraries and International Relations
250 Broadway, Committee Rm 14th Fl
New York, NY 10017
Re: New York City Council Fiscal Year 2014 Preliminary Budget, Mayor’s FY ‘13 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 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 a recent, expensive, city-funded renovation, with the intention of shrinking it down to half-size. 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
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March 8, 2013
James G. Van Bramer, Chair
Committee on Cultural Affairs,
Libraries and International Relations
250 Broadway, Committee Rm 14th Fl
New York, NY 10017
Re: New York City Council Fiscal Year 2014 Preliminary Budget, Mayor’s FY ‘13 Preliminary Management Report and Agency Oversight Hearings
Dear Committee:
We need to investigate. We need an audit. 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 says that Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein is her idea of an ideal board member for her library systems board. That is indicative of a terrible mind set on her part.
Mr. Blankfein is exactly the kind of board members 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 this week. Mr. Blankfein is also a proponent of the notion that
the public needs to lower its expectations about entitlements that he says he is firm “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?
Why is it that 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? Mr. Schwarzman is the Blackstone Group. That’s one of the biggest real estate companies around.
Why is Mr. Schwarzman’s name now 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? Mr. Schwarzman has put his name on a demolition project, a real estate boondoggle.
We need an investigation. We need an audit. We cannot trust such trustees with our precious publicly paid for library assets.
Sincerely,
Citizens Defending Libraries
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March 8, 2013
James G. Van Bramer, Chair
Committee on Cultural Affairs,
Libraries and International Relations
250 Broadway, Committee Rm 14th Fl
New York, NY 10017
Re: New York City Council Fiscal Year 2014 Preliminary Budget, Mayor’s FY ‘13 Preliminary Management Report and Agency Oversight Hearings
Dear Committee:
How can we be funding the libraries without being told what the plans are to reorganize the system, shrinking and preferentially selling off its real estate assets, the most valuable first? We as taxpayers pay the lion's share of the library budgets: We are therefore entitled to know the overall plans, what it is intended we will be left with when the great fire sale is finished. Possibly only crumbs?
We know that New York Public Library has converted the four main libraries into real estate deals. We know that the Brooklyn Public Library’s strategic plan calls for “leveraging” (read “sale” of all its real estate assets.
These sell-offs cannot be consented to piecemeal, without knowing the overall plan. We are the taxpayers paying for the system and paying for the assets now being sold for private benefit. We demand that these deals be stopped until the full plan is comprehensively revealed, studied and approved by the City Council.
We need sunlight on these issues. We need an accounting of what the overall system plans are.
Sincerely,
Citizens Defending Libraries
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| Some of the supplementary handwritten testimony delivered by CDL hearing attendees (click to enlarge) |
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| James G. Van Bramer and collgues listening |
Also testify at the hearing were representatives from the Committee to Save The New York Public Library
They testified from their
“The Truth About the Central Library Plan” document released the previous day (see Press Release-
“This detailed analysis questions many of the Library's assumptions and calls for public debate about the CLP's impact on the Research Library and its users, on branch libraries throughout the city, and on the financial well-being of the library itself.”)
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| Representatives of Committee to Save The New York Public Library testifying |
The starting bullet points of that document (which supplies a wealth of useful footnotes) :
The plan is highly controversial:
• It will be hugely expensive, costing a minimum of $300 million (probably much more), of which $150 million will come from New York City taxpayers. There is great concern that the Library's focus on a highly-complex construction project will absorb desperately-needed funds which might otherwise pay for renovations of branch libraries, and replenish slashed curatorial and acquisitions budgets.
• It will radically reduce the space available for the Mid-Manhattan and SIBL.
• It will threaten the 42nd Street Library's status as one of the world's great research libraries.
• It will threaten the architectural integrity of the landmarked 42nd Street building.
• It does not take into consideration more efficient and less destructive alternatives, such as combining SIBL and the Mid-Manhattan into a rehabilitated and expanded building on the Mid-Manhattan site.
There is a whole section about how in facilitating these real estate deals for developers,
“The Library Has Chosen the Most Expensive Option.”
CONTACT: To contact
Citizens Defending Libraries email Backpack362 (at) aol.com.
You may also leave a comment with information in the comments section at the bottom of this page.
The link below takes you to where you may sign the petition:
Save New York City Libraries From Bloomberg Developer Destruction
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