He Gets It! He Gets it!

But what does Nutter get?

by Isaiah Thompson

David Scott SUCCESSFUL SAVE: The Coalition to Save the Libraries held numerous rallies to protest closings. They worked.

lessons learned

When the mayor formally submits his much-feared budget proposal to City Council this morning, it will include at least one piece of supposedly good news: Despite millions of dollars in cuts to almost every department in the city, the mayor will propose that none of the Free Library branches be closed.

Even in his worst-case-scenario budget, which includes a 10 percent cut to libraries, according to a draft leaked last week, Nutter intends to keep all 49 library branches open. He'd rather reduce every library to half-days than shut some down permanently.

This is pretty much the opposite of the position Nutter took last November, when the economy had just started to go kablooey and when the mayor, in an effort to plug a $1 billion five-year budget shortfall, announced that he'd be slashing 20 percent of the Free Library's budget. This was to be accomplished, mainly, by permanently closing 11 branches.

Then came the library wars. The protests. The bad press. The lawsuit.

When Judge Idee Fox ordered at the last minute that libraries remain open, opponents of the closures rejoiced. It seemed, at the time, a little bit like Christmas. And though Nutter fought back for a little while, appealing the ruling and indicating that he'd replace closings with severe cuts, he eventually backed down on both fronts.

If Judge Fox's ruling was a down payment on a miracle for library advocates, today's budget would appear to be the thing itself, signed and delivered: Closing libraries has gone from the first thing Nutter wanted to do to the last.

The mayor's office has justified his changed position with an argument that's hard to knock: He's responded to the will of the people.

"We heard from the library, from advocates and from John Q. Citizen that, given the range of potential negative outcomes, this was the best alternative," said spokesman Doug Oliver by e-mail. "We've had to make some very tough choices and other departments weren't so fortunate."

The mayor, in other words, learned his lesson: Don't close libraries.

But wait. Is that the right lesson? Sure, some Philadelphians opposed closing any library under any circumstance. But in the lawsuit that stopped the closings, the plaintiffs alleged the mayor had to get permission to close libraries from Council — not that he couldn't close any at all. And at-large Councilman Bill Green, who led the charge against the closings, said repeatedly that he did not take a position one way or another on whether branches should be closed. He wanted more information, he said. The point, essentially, was procedural.

We followed the proposed closings closely at City Paper, too, questioning the justifications offered for picking particular branches and pointing out various pieces of specific information — the exact cost of running each branch, for example —which the administration seemed unwilling or unable to supply.

But instead of deciding to hash out library closures with Council, the mayor's just decided not to shut any down.

That decision may come at a cost. Because while all branches remained open this fall, the libraries did suffer from the first round of budget cuts: The mayor cut 20 percent from the library budget. Already, library staff has been reduced by over a hundred people, through layoffs, transfers or the elimination of unfilled positions. Free Library Director Siobhan Reardon now faces the prospect of running all 49 branches with significantly fewer resources per library.

Consequently, Reardon — who as recently as last week told the Inquirer that she still thought her plan to close branches was the right one —has had to gut everything else. The budget for books, periodicals, software and computers has been slashed. And because of the layoffs and transfers, having enough staff to stay up and running is tough.

HALF OFF DEPOT

Why live life at full price?

"We are attempting to keep all libraries open — but on a bit of an ad hoc basis," she writes in an e-mail.

Some libraries are fully staffed; others are not. In order to keep everything open, says Reardon, she's had to "redeploy" librarians from one branch to another daily. "During January — and this is a direct response to the budget reduction — we redeployed over 1,100 staff hours to keep libraries open and lost another 253 due to [temporary] branch closures."

All of this raises a question: Did the push to save the libraries backfire? Would it have been better if the mayor had not deemed the libraries political poison and was now proposing to close one? Or three? Would we, the people, still have opposed such a cut over having, say, new materials?

The problem with massive public outcry is that it can spook politicians and drive them to extremes. The libraries became so politicized in the past few months that it may have been easier for Mayor Nutter to simply change course and leave them all open than to try and hash out the details of the budget with Council — which was also struck by the uproar about libraries. But if the main lesson the mayor learned was to avoid debating libraries, that means questions about how best to operate them will remain unanswered. With the Free Library running on one cylinder, that could be dangerous. What if the city's finances get worse? What if library usage increases — as it currently is — to the point where more staff is needed?

"I don't think the mayor has drawn the right lesson," says Councilman Green. Green believes the mayor still sees the budget, and the fate of the libraries, as his decision. Of course, Nutter is about to propose his budget to Council, which Green and other Council members will have to ratify. But Green dislikes a recent decision by the administration to require more staff at library branches, rather than less, following the layoffs.

"He's creating an arbitrary rule about the number of guards needed to be at a library," Green says.

Green recently proposed that the library be funded not from the general fund, but directly, through millage of property tax. To become law, the proposal would need to pass a referendum. Mayor Nutter, and other members of Council, have called it "irresponsible."

"Let's let the people decide," counters Green.

Uh-oh.

(isaiah.thompson@citypaper.net)