Archive for April, 2010
FOSEL Annual Meeting on Tuesday, May 4, to Feature New Board, Update on Next Phase of Library Battle before City Council
Posted by marleen in FOSEL News, Save our Libraries on April 26, 2010
The outgoing board of the Friends of the South End Library (FOSEL) will vote in a new board at the group’s Annual Meeting on Tuesday, May 4. The meeting will be held at 6:30 PM at the South End Library. The public is cordially invited. Seven nominees from different neighborhoods in the South End have agreed to form the second FOSEL board since 2008, when the organization became a 501C3 charitable organization. The terms are for two years. The six current board members, Marleen Nienhuis, Anthony Woeltz, Dana Dubreuil, Stephen Fox, Lois Russell and Ann Wilson Lloyd, are stepping down to make room for the seven new nominees. They are Barbara Sommerfeld, Anita Mercado, Glyn Polson, P.K. Shiu, Rhys Sevier, Courtney Fitzgerald, and Adam Castiglioni. An eighth nominee may have to postpone her commitment to next year due to a sudden increase in work load. Brief bios of the nominees, all passionate library advocates and South End Library users, will be made available later this week.
In addition to the board vote, there will be an update on what is happening generally at the BPL, and particularly the coming battle before the Ways and Means Committee at the City Council over the BPL budget. The chair of this committee happens to be Mark Ciommo, in whose district the Faneuil branch is located, one of the four the BPL wants to close. While the South End Library is saved from extinction for the moment, some 90 positions are planned to be eliminated in the budget the mayor sent to the city council, recently. This will likely affect the South End branch. Unfortunately, under the current BPL regime the stated plan is still to reduce the current number of libraries from 26 to eight “lead” libraries, of 20,000 square feet or more, over a period of time. Most immediately, four libraries (Lower Mills near the Milton line, Faneuil in Brighton, Orient Heights in East Boston and the tiniest one, Washington Village in South Boston), have been selected for closure by the BPL trustees.
The BPL trustees’ taunting of many Boston city councillors and state delegates for being absent during their vote on April 9 to close libraries and lay off library employees, has already begun to backfire. (City councillors, who all showed up at an earlier BPL trustee meeting in March, were not allowed to speak at that time and sent packing by BPL chair Jeffrey Rudman.) Members of the Boston state delegation had attended numerous public meetings protesting library closings, including one March 24 at the South End Library. The entire Boston delegation, moreover, had also met with BPL president Amy Ryan to insist that state cuts be applied to state services and NOT to close city branches. As a result of the stand-off, twelve state reps (Forry, Moran, Basile, Wallace, Allen, Fox, Honan, Mahlia, Michlewitz, Rushing, Sanchez and Walz) have filed several amendments to fight library closings, one of them to withhold $2.4 million from next year’s state funding if the BPL proceeds with its plans to shutter branches. State Senator Jack (Hart South Boston) is working with his colleagues in the House to come up with a simnilar amendment for the Senate budget. An excellent article on the subject also appeared in the Dorchester Reporter.
Take a Peek at the 2010 Library Park Easter Egg Hunt..
Posted by admin in Library Event on April 20, 2010
BPL Trustees Vote to Close Four Branches Amid a Boston Brawl at the Copley Library
Posted by marleen in Save our Libraries on April 9, 2010
The BPL trustees voted 5 to 1 to close four neighborhood library branches this morning while facing an angry crowd that included city councillors Felix Arroyo, Ayanna Pressley and John Tobin, as well as State Rep. Linda Dorcena Forry, who represents one of the to-be-closed branches at Lower Mills. Trustee Paul LaCamera, who had made an impassioned plea for an amendment to delay the closing of the Orient Heights branch, another of the four included in this option, to September 11, 2011, abstained from the vote. Within minutes, another motion was passed to make sure the next “new library” in Boston would be located in East Boston. Plans for a new branch there, which was the result of community hearings in two years ago have been sitting on a shelf since late 2008.The other two branches on the hit list of the option approved by the trustees are Faneuil Hall in Brighton and the one located in the Old Colony housing project in South Boston, Washington Village.
During the voting process, during which trustees also considered the options of not closing any branches or closing seven, Amy Ryan left the room and returned with the news that Mayor Menino would present a better future for the East Boston library in his capital budget to be delivered at the City Council April 14. This provoked a number of cries from the audience that what was needed instead was a “public process” and Felix Arroyo’s comment that the city was “pitting one library against another.”
Arroyo, during the public comment section preceding the vote, told the trustees bluntly that he “can’t support closing any of the options presented by” the trustees. “This is not the end,” Arroyo told the crowd of more than a hundred residents and media people, “Nine city councillors have signed a letter that they will not support library closings.” Councillor John Tobin, representing Jamaica Plain, said that closing libraries was equivalent to “leaving people behind. That is a matter of civil rights,” he added.” Addressing the trustees, Tobin said, “You’ll make your vote, but whatever it is, we will keep our branches open.”
State Rep. Dorcena Forry, who remembered growing up using the Uphams Corner Library, criticized the BPL trustees for pitting the city against the state. Referring to the possibility of more than a 100 BPL people losing their jobs, she asked, “Have you considered taking a furlough day, as we have done at the state? You make it seem as if the funding is a state issue. Ask the mayor for more funding. We at the state delegation took the vote to allow for the city to charge a meal tax. Use it.”
Councillor Ayanna Pressley, calling on the trustees to protect the safe public spaces libraries represent, opposed the plan to close libraries. “It is not the plan itself,” she said, “but the process by which you arrived at it.”
Do Bostonians Want 8 Pricey Suburban-style 20,000 Sq Ft Libraries or 26 Many-sized Walk-to Neighborhood Branches?
Posted by marleen in Library Innovations, Save our Libraries on April 5, 2010
BPL president Amy Ryan has proposed “transforming” Boston’s library system by preserving eight existing “lead” libraries that are 20,000 square feet or more at the expense of the remaining 18 smaller libraries anchoring Boston’s 26 neighborhoods. The question is, Why? New York City just opened its newest branch in Battery City. It is 10,000 square feet. (See FOSEL earlier post on Green libraries). Of Seattle’s 26 new libraries, 15 are 10,000 square feet or less; 10 are between 10,000 and 16,000 square feet. Apart from its downtown library, which measures 362,000 square feet, none of Seattle’s neighborhood libraries are as large as 20,000 square feet. Large-sized libraries are expensive to build. The Mattapan branch cost almost $17 million. Battery City park’s construction budget was under $7 million. Seattle’s new neighborhood libraries cost from less than $500,000 to $10 million. For more about Seattle’s library-renovation model, see libraries_for_all_report.
“Green” Public Library Opens in Battery Park, NYC, Following in Footsteps of “Green” Ballard Library in Seattle
Posted by marleen in Library Innovations on April 2, 2010
Amid the Orwellian approach by the BPL’s leadership to “transform” the Boston public library system by engaging in closures, layoffs and service reductions, there are examples of more enlightened visions. In New York City, a new green library just opened in Battery Park, with the assistance of a grant by their Wall Street neighbor Goldman Sachs (yes, the same guys who almost drove our economy into the ditch..never mind..life is complicated). Battery Park Public Library is only 10,000 square feet, only half the size BPL president Amy Ryan thinks is required to be a ‘lead library.” It was built where there had been none before, and, being located in NYC, is not likely to have parking. This is not the first green library in the country: when Seattle built, renovated and rebuilt its library system in the last ten years, it included an environmental marvel, the Ballard Library. It is only 15,000 square feet, twice the size it was before, but among its many environmentally responsive features, it has a roof planted with 18,000 low-water-use plants that can be viewed by periscope from the floor below. It is never to early to start dreaming about the libraries we deserve, especially since we are paying for them. Let’s start right now.