Here is the story on the Jamesbrug Public Library that I promised yesterday. And here is our editorial.
As I said yesterday,
Read the story and the editorial and then get out to next week’s meeting.
South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
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Check out tomorrow’s Cranbury Press for a story on what appears to be a change of heart about the proposed referendum to defund the Jamesburg Public Library. Mayor Tony Lamantia and council members Barbara Carpenter and Tom Bodall already want it tabled or killed — just one more council member and it dies.
Read the story and the editorial and then get out to next week’s meeting.
South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
E-mail me by clicking here.
The state Legislature maybe revising its cap law, though the chances remain slim. The cap law, which the governor pushed hard as a way to control spending, always seemed a foolish contrivance that was likely to do little more than force towns to make bad budgetary choices.
So, enter Jamesburg. The borough, facing difficult fiscal realities made more difficult by the cap, was preparing to close its library, the council claiming that it had no choice.
The plan was defeatist, but given the fiscal mess that is New Jersey, you could see how Jamesburg and dozens of other small or urban towns might view something like this as a quick fix.
In any case, relief may — or may not (the bill had not bee voted upon as of 6 p.m.) — be on the way.
This story — reported and written by Bill Greenwood — will be running in The Cranbury Press tomorrow:
Legislation that would exempt public library spending from a 4 percent tax levy cap could alter the Borough Council’s plans for a fall referendum on the Jamesburg library.
The bill, which has the support of the New Jersey League of Municipalities and the New Jersey Library Association, had not been scheduled for a vote as of Thursday afternoon. It was unclear whether it or a substitute measure might be voted upon before the Legislature goes into recess this week, according to members of the Assembly.
The legislation, sponsored by state Assembly Majority Leader Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-Mercer), would remove state-mandated spending for municipal public libraries from a new cap on tax levies that will take effect next month for towns with fiscal year budgets and in January for towns like Jamesburg that operate on calendar-year budgets.
The new cap, signed into law by Gov. Jon Corzine earlier this year, will limit increases in tax levies, or the total amount raised from taxes, to 4 percent. It included few exemptions and moved library spending under the cap for the first time in 25 years.
The Borough Council says the cap law and a longstanding state law that requires municipalities to provide a minimum amount of funding for municipal libraries are squeezing the borough’s budget.
It says it needs more flexibility in crafting its budget and is proposing two questions for the November ballot. One would ask borough residents to approve a change in the library’s status from a municipal library to an association library, which would allow the council to reduce funding. A second, non-binding question would ask if the library should be closed. The council would need to approve ordinances by mid-August to place the questions on the ballot.
Borough Council member Brian Grimes said Thursday that council members support the cap exemption. He said approval of the legislation would make the referendums unnecessary.
“We need to have this done,” he said. “Not just for our library, but for every other community in the state thats in the same position.”
Pat Tumulty, executive director of the New Jersey Library Association, said her organization sought to have the bill introduced and voted on Thursday by the state Assembly and Senate as an emergency measure because the Legislature will not hold another session until November. She said there are many urban areas that operate on fiscal-year budgets — such as East Orange, Newark and Bayonne — that could be affected.
Ms. Tumulty said there are 245 municipalities in New Jersey with municipal public libraries, and she expected them all to be affected once the new cap law takes effect.
“All the municipalities will be impacted,” she said. “As soon as they start putting their budgets together for next year, they’ll realize the implications.”
Assemblyman Bill Baroni, a Republican whose district includes Jamesburg and Monroe, said he would support the legislation if it is introduced.
“We need to do everything we can through legislation and regulation to save Jamesburgs library,” said Mr. Baroni, who is running for a state Senate seat being vacated by Republican Peter Inverso.
He introduced an alternative bill Thursday that would exempt library spending from the levy cap for one year. He said he was unsure whether the Coleman emergency bill would be introduced and wanted to have a backup plan. He said the alternative measure is truly an emergency bill that would at least give us more time to fix it permanently.
Assemblywoman Linda Greenstein, a Democrat from the same district as Mr. Baroni, supports the cap exemption for libraries, but said it was unlikely that the Coleman bill would be introduced. She said a letter would be written to Gov. Corzine asking him to exempt library spending from the cap. The governor has publicly opposed adding exemptions to the tax levy cap in the past.
Sen. Inverso could not be reached for comment.
The exemptions would seem logical, except that they create the impetus for more exemptions to be built into the cap, ultimately rendering it useless. That may not be a bad idea, but it doesn’t address the real need for reform any better than the cap.
I would move libraries off budget entirely, creating a separate dedicated tax similar to the open space tax that South Brunswick, Cranbury, Monroe and Middlesex County. It would be the local equivalent of Mercer County, which has a county system and a dedicate tax.
The tax would be flat and towns could be given the opportunity to make municipal contributions, as well. And libraries could still rely on Friends chapters and foundations for extra cash.
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Members of the Jamesburg Borough Council are claiming they don’t want to close the public library. But they are willing to kill its funding, which — despite their protestations to the contrary — is likely to result in its demise.
The library plan, unveiled last month, calls for two referendum questions to be placed on the November ballot, one ending the library’s municipal affiliation and the other, a nonbinding vote, asking if it should be closed.
The council, as I said, has repeatedly said they don’t want the library to close but that state laws are creating a budget crunch that can only be relieved by changing the way the library is funded.
All six council members and the mayor said they wanted to keep the library functioning at its current level, but they want to be able to negotiate appropriations each year with the library board. They encouraged those in attendance to send letters to Gov. Jon Corzine and local legislators asking to have library funding excluded from the cap.
And while we’re at it, we can exclude garbage and pension costs, etc. I don’t like the cap law, either, but carving out exclusions is not the correct way to address the problem.
At the same time, the council is being extremely protective of other services that should be a part of this discussion, namely police, trash collection and public works. Councilman Otto Kostbar offers his reasons for leaving these three off the table:
He said the Police Department should not be cut because the crime rate is down and officers help children safely reach school on foot. He said there are only four workers there and losing any of them would “cause significant problems.” He also said doing away with municipal garbage pickup could be a health risk if homeowners fail to pay bills and private companies stop collecting trash.
The implication being that cutting these other areas would endanger kids walking to school and lead to trash piling by the side of the road — both of which are patently absurd (is he saying that borough residents would be less likely to pay their bills than their neighbors in Monroe and Cranbury, neither of whom get municipal pickup?). But there is nothing like using fear to win an argument. Just ask George Bush and Dick Cheney.
It also ignores some basic points , which I’ll outline here:
In the end, regardless of what they say, council members will be to blame if the library closes. They are the ones making the tough decisions.
South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
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Derrick Z. Jackson, the great columnist for The Boston Globe, comments today on two trends — the TV watching habits of the extremely young and the closing of public libraries around the country — connecting the dots and sounding an alarm for our future.
What struck me about the column as much as anything was the timing — Jamesburg, as I’ve written before, may ask its voters to close its library as a way of dealing with two realities: its regularly tight budget and a new state levy cap law that limits the growth in a town’s tax levy. Jamesburg says the combination of cap levy and library funding mandate means they will have to cut from other services.
Jamesburg Mayor Tony LaMantia blames the state, but New Jersey has a rather farsighted library funding law. Towns that have public libraries are guaranteed a minimum amount of funding and can only end the regular subsidies by asking voters to “de-municipalize,” or remove the municipal sanction.
Mayor LaMantia wants to see the law changed, but his idea — to allow towns to negotiate with libraries to determine a fair amount of funding every year — will do little more than lead to the closing of libraries in smaller communities. The reality is that there is no such thing as negotiations in this case — it’s the town’s money so it will be up to the town’s governing body to provide as much or as little cash to the library as it wants.
The upshot, as I said, will not be good for libraries in the state — and could result in New Jersey follow the unfortunate lead of Massachusetts, where towns “are closing libraries or severely curtailing their hours because of budget cuts,” Jackson writes.
In Medway, which cut the library staff from 11 people to three and library hours from 40 a week to 20, Wendy Rowe, the chairwoman of that town’s library board of trustees, told the Globe in a feature story, “Libraries are the soul of the community. They’re community centers — not just books. And anybody can go to it.”
Libraries may be the soul of the community, but taxpayers have been willing to sell it, seeing them as less a priority than police or their own pocketbooks. Massachusetts is the state that claims the first lending library, seeded by a donation by Benjamin Franklin to the town of Franklin. The town originally asked Franklin to donate a bell. Saying he wished to spare the town the expense of a steeple for the bell, Franklin wrote that he hoped the town would accept books in the spirit of “sense being preferable to sound.”
The abandonment of libraries is part of a national picture where about half of public libraries in the United States had cuts or flat funding last year. This comes as their use has actually grown nationally. According to federal data in the 2007 “State of America’s Libraries” report by the American Library Association, library visits went up 61 percent from 1994 to 2004.
General circulation increased 28 percent in that time. The circulation of children’s materials went up 44 percent and participation in children’s programs increased 42 percent. Even though many people now go to libraries to use free Internet service, the top reason for visiting a library still remains reading or checking out a book, according to the ALA.
In a report this year for the Urban Libraries Council done by the Urban Institute and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, libraries are an unsung economic engine as a core of a community’s literacy and connection to technology and job opportunities. “Rather than succumbing to obsolescence with the advent of new information technologies,” the report said, “the basic business of public libraries is being recast. . . Public libraries are positioned to fuel not only new, but next economies.”
But they have to stay open and they have to be given the kind of public money necessary to keep their book collections and technology current.
Closing the Jamesburg library — or cutting off its municipal revenue — may offer some temporary budget and tax relief, but it will make Jamesburg poorer in the long run.
Keep it open.
South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
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Hank Kalet 