A Question of Cost

We don't know how much is being saved by closing 11 libraries.

by Isaiah Thompson

Michael T. Regan CENTRAL BOOKING: The Central Branch of the Free Library is safe from cuts, but should the Library be looking for ways to save money besides closures?

There hasn't been a whole lot of variety in the four town hall meetings that Michael Nutter has held — Nutter, his administrators and the community groups that have come to challenge them have for the most part stuck to the same script. One of the lines Nutter has delivered is that he plans to replicate some of the services currently provided at libraries in other locations, such as recreation centers. On Monday, at the town hall meeting at the John Perzel Community Center in the Northeast, the Friends of the Holmesburg Library had a new counter for this talking point.

"The question we asked," says Karen Lash, president of the Friends group, "is if you're going to do that, what is it going to cost? The Library had no answer."

Increasingly, the debate over libraries is centering around the issue of cost: the cost of operating each of the 11 apparently doomed branches, the exact amount of savings to be gained by closing them, and the cost of replacing those services or replicating them elsewhere. 

Among the data that has so far been provided by the Free Library and the mayor's office, those costs have remained conspicuously absent.

Despite requests from citizen groups, City Council members and City Paper, the Free Library has yet to produce numbers describing the exact cost of operating each of the libraries slated to be closed.

Councilman Bill Green, who requested the numbers in a letter to the administration five weeks ago, finds the lack of response telling.

"If they don't have it, it means they made a very uninformed decision," says Green. "If they do have it, and they're not sharing it, I can only assume it doesn't support their positions."

When the library cuts were first announced just over a month ago, the Free Library justified its decisions by citing some specific criteria — among them size, circulation, program usage and distance to other libraries.

But many library supporters felt that these criteria didn't always match the decisions. And so, two weeks ago, City Paper announced what we call the Library Project, an attempt to collect and make public as much branch data as we could: circulation, turnstile counts, program attendance, computer usage, income levels. We analyzed data and found that most of the libraries slated for closing did indeed match the Free Library's own criteria. But not all of them.

Some libraries that seemed to fit the bill for closure were to remain open — Cobbs Creek Library, for example, which holds a special place in the mayor's heart (in announcing the cuts he said he "grew up" there), but which the Library itself listed as having most of the traits that would theoretically spell closure. Other libraries — Holmesburg, for one — seemed to lack any of the drawbacks cited as reasons for closing down a branch.

But our analysis ended where the data did: with cost. And cost, in a sense, is everything. The city has asked the library to cut 20 percent of its operating costs — approximately $8 million — from its budget. Ostensibly, most of these savings will come from closing the 11 branches. But without knowing the exact operating cost of each of the libraries in the system, it's impossible to know how much will actually be saved by closing those branches, or whether the same amount might be saved by other means. And the few figures that have been released don't really resolve the question.

Last week, Free Library Director and President Siobhan Reardon provided to City Council a document titled "Cost to Run a Small to Medium-Sized Library," which listed a total cost of about $565,000.

Even that number, which includes $88,200 in fringe benefits — an expense paid from the budget of the Finance Department, not the Library — would put the total savings at only $6.2 million, nearly $2 million short of the $8 million goal (Luke Butler, a spokesman for the Mayor's Office, attributed the extra costs to "non-branch-specific costs," but was unable to specify what those consisted of).

Nor does that number necessarily reflect the costs of the libraries being closed. The same document, for example, accounts for $252,000 in salaries per library — a figure that assumes a full staff of six. But at least four of the libraries being closed are already operating with less-than-full staffs. The Holmesburg branch, for example, currently has only four full-time positions. 

In a recent e-mail, Reardon explained that closing an under-staffed library still saves the full amount in salary, because the library is budgeted for full staff, and it's the budget that needs to be cut. But Councilman Green counters that the libraries were functioning with low staff, and maybe other libraries could, too. "If you reduced other libraries to the staff of Holmesburg, you're talking about leaving every library open."

Until we're able to see branch-specific figures for ourselves, it's impossible to know how much, exactly, will be saved by closing libraries. But if the number gets smaller, it becomes more important to ask whether these cuts are worth it. As the number creeps down, the possibilities for finding that money elsewhere, it would seem, go up. Amy Dougherty, executive director of Friends of the Free Library, for example, has pushed for a model of "shared sacrifice" that would allow all branches to remain open; City Council members have discussed temporarily reducing hours across the board and rotating temporary closures. This Monday, Council will hold hearings on the closures.

"We believe that [a shared sacrifice model] would leave the libraries open four days a week; the administration says three days a week," says Green. "Part of the hearings on Monday will be for the administration to prove that to us."

(isaiah.thompson@citypaper.net)