Full disclosure first; my family and I use the library on a frequent basis. I probably check out library materials at least once every 2 weeks. I rediscovered the library about 5 years ago and have used it regularly ever since.
That being said, listening to the likes of Margaret Atwood and the other tree huggers come out of the woodwork to express their displeasure in the idea of closing a few libraries has made me come out of hibernation this summer and throw in my two cents on the matter.
First off, the KPMG report merely suggested cutting back some library branches; Toronto city council hadn’t even discussed the matter before Atwood and her band of merry lefties came out to string up Rob Ford in the centre of Toronto’s Reference Library.
This report was the beginning of what should be a discussion on how to make the library system more cost efficient for the city of Toronto and Toronto taxpayers. Yet instead of bringing up any constructive ideas they simply piled a bunch of blowhards into Toronto city council chambers for a 24 marathon filibuster for public attention.
Do these people realize how many people don’t actually use the library anymore? I have had discussions with friends and relatives that will happily schlep down the road to a Chapters or Indigo and spend $4 for crappy coffee at the Starbucks and then buy a book for $29.95 and a magazine for $7.95 instead of getting the same reading material for free down the street.
Many kids are aware of the Toronto library system because teachers use the facilities for neighbourhood field trips and learning exercises and yet by the time high school rolls around, everything is Google this or Yahoo that.
Technology has become an enemy of the library system as well. With the growing popularity of e-books and portable readers, many people have rediscovered reading without leaving the comfort of their living room.
The library is becoming a dinosaur and as much as it would pain me and my family to lose our neighbourhood library, I can see the reasons why cutting back on some of the libraries may need to be looked at.
Toronto unions have fought the proposed cutbacks fairly strongly; I remember years ago when David Miller decided to try and reduce the library hours by closing on a Monday to attempt to reel in some of the city of Toronto’s spending. That experiment lasted one day and resulted in library workers sitting in an empty library with the lights off getting paid as per their union agreement while the public was locked out.
It is time to examine which branches are not used frequently and should be mothballed. It is time to come up with solutions for reducing the expense of running a library system as opposed to simply crying at council meetings about wanting to keep the status quo.
One suggestion that I had was closing some branches in the middle of the day during the week. The library opens at 9am and is usually open until 8:30pm. Why not close the library for a couple of hours in the daytime. People that use the library in the daytime have the flexibility of when they can go so why not close the library from say 12:30 to 2:30, library staff will have to take the hit on this but is every library closed for 2 hours a day, would result in a savings of 51480 hours per year. If you just took an average rate of $18/hour the city of Toronto would save almost $1 million annually. Would the average Toronto library user suffer if the library was closed for 2 hours a day during the week?
Schools could schedule their visits in the morning, retired or unemployed who use the library would just have to choose different hours of the day to use the library.
A simple cut in hours such as this would generate a savings of $1 million, are there not any other out of the box ideas that we can come up with?
If cutting branches was still to be discussed, that would be a further savings depending on how many branches are cut.
Other ideas have been suggested such as merging libraries with half empty schools in Toronto as was done in Kitchener a few years ago.
Yet mention these ideas to library backers and nothing but resistance comes spewing out.
The city of Toronto is going broke. KPMG’s report came up with a myriad of ideas of where savings can be found. Although my honest belief is that until the labour force in Toronto is cut down and union wages are scaled back to private sector levels, there will be no easy solution to Toronto’s financial woes.
I don’t want my library to be eliminated, but I also don’t want my tax dollars to be strewn about city services in some ideal utopia of a city with services plated with gold.
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[...] hippie beliefs are, all 99 libraries were never going to be closed; but a few could be and some reduced hours could be looked at to save the Toronto taxpayer a few [...]