Reading LA Weekly’s City of Airheads, which condemns budget cuts to the Los Angeles library system, should give Glendale library users good reasons to appreciate their city.
Glendale officials seem to appreciate the public library’s cultural and educational role. City council hasn’t taken more from the library budget than from other department budgets. The library’s role in giving citizens more opportunities and a broader outlook is clearly acknowledged.
But across the border in LA, drastic library closures are limiting opportunities just as people need job retraining, opportunities for free self-education, and internet access for homework and job searches.
The LA Weekly story is worth reading in its entirety, and is especially ironic just after Los Angeles completed a ten-year library building program, culminating with the November 2009 opening of the Gold-LEED certified Silverlake branch.
From the LA Weekly:
Many public library systems — the five biggies are Boston, New York, Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles — have faced an ugly two years of recession-spawned budget cuts and trimmed hours. Yet political leaders who control the purse strings for the biggest cities fought and saved their libraries from severe harm.
The city that has not done that is Los Angeles.
Here, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa executed an unprecedented, and punishing, raid on the libraries. Last spring he convinced the City Council to close the city’s central and eight regional libraries on Sundays, then slashed $22 million from the 2010-11 budget and closed all 73 libraries on Mondays beginning July 19. Library officials say as many as 15,000 youths — plus an untold number of adults — have been turned away every closed day this summer.
…Library officials estimate that so far, thousands of low-income, mostly minority young people who rely on city libraries have been shut out. Now, with most LAUSD schools starting class this week, teachers are assigning homework to hundreds of thousands of students, many of whom don’t have the necessary Internet access. The problems will become acute.