The Boston City Council will review a revised budget sent by the Menino administration to reflect changes in a number of FY11 budget items, including library funding. The meeting will take place tomorrow, Wednesday, June 23rd, at 9:30 AM in the Piemonte Room.

City councillors had made it clear there was no chance they would approve a FY11 budget that supported library closings and layoffs. Earlier this week, in what one legislator described as a flurry of emails and phone calls, the expectation developed that the BPL had backed off from library closings for this coming fiscal year and that the intervening time gained would be used to find a better solution to library funding than closings and layoffs. At the BPL’s latest “special” trustees meeting, however, it turned out that the proposed closings and layoffs would proceed but not until “later this (fiscal) year,” according to Amy Ryan, BPL president, who was unwilling to state a specific time for these closures. City councillors, echoing the frustration of the state reps present at the trustees meeting who had hoped for better news, said they would review the revised budget and planned to work closely with their colleagues at the State House to stabilize the library system.

Tomorrow morning’s city council meeting is is not a hearing public comment, but  an “open meeting” the public is cordially invited to attend.

Responding to pressure by Boston city councillors, hounded by their constituents upset about proposed closings of four libraries, the Boston Public Library’s trustees have agreed to another public meeting to discuss keeping these branches open if the money for it can be found. It will be held Monday, June 21, at 3:00 PM, in the Orientation Room at the McKim Building in the Copley Library. The public is invited.

A number of residents, city councillors and state representatives, have asked the trustees and BPL president Amy Ryan on several different occasions whether libraries would remain in operation if state and city budget cuts, cited as the reason for closings and layoffs, would be reversed. The non-committal answers by BPL leadership led some to believe that the economic downturn, blamed for the proposed closings, was used as a convenient cover for a long-existing plan to shrink the BPL system of 26 branches by a third or less, thereby limiting public debate.

An interview with Mayor Menino by the Boston Globe editorial board in 2006, for example, long before the current financial pressures were felt, revealed that the mayor at that time already stated that “we have too many branches.” The mayor appoints all nine trustees. His budget chief, Lisa Signori, is in control of both the BPL annual budget and, since 2008, its trust accounts. The trust accounts, as well as the BPL Foundation’s account, usually meant to enrich the library beyond its operational budget allocated by the city, have been used in the past to pay for operational expenses, including a housing allowance of $20,000 for BPL president Ryan last year, and $500,000 in operational expenses for Dudley Library in 2004.

During a budget hearing before the City Council earlier this month, Councillor Felix Arroyo asked president Ryan again whether she would accept city or state funds to keep open the four libraries voted by the trustees to be closed (Faneuil, Orient Heights, Washington Village and Lower Mills). Saying she did not have the authority to decide, Ryan agreed to ask BPL trustees chair, Jeffrey Rudman, for an answer. The June 21st public meeting at Copley Library will focus on that question.

The long-awaited June 3rd library budget hearing before the City Council’s Ways and Means Committee saw an overflow audience of library supporters who pleaded with, and occasionally begged, city councillors to stand firm against BPL’s proposed library closings and layoffs. Testimony continued late into the thunder-stormy Thursday night while a few late-night guards stood at the doors of the otherwise desolate City Hall building. Seven votes are needed to send the library budget, as proposed, back to the Mayor’s Office. The budget deadline is June 30th. The first budget votes will take place next week.

“My heart is beating in my throat,” said one Brighton resident. “We’re people losing jobs, livelihoods, dreams, stories.” A Latino resident of Orient Heights, her voice quavering, spoke words barely discernible as they came over the struggling sound system, but solid bets could be placed she wasn’t asking to have her library closed.  A Fields Corner resident, whose library will remain open, told the councillors, “I am here, instead of reading bedtime stories at home, because I see an injustice. I don’t know a magic fix for the numbers but you do your job finding the money. You close a library and you’ll open a jail.”

And so it went. Passionate words about the need to safeguard public spaces; why Internet technology, touted by the BPL’s leadership as the solution to the cost of maintaining library buildings, can’t take the place of the ‘everyday one-on-one’ that happens in libraries; that people in East Boston can’t afford the tunnel fees to get to another library; how the city council should “help residents navigate” a public process to strengthen and protect libraries. Recently sworn-in US citizens said “libraries is where we become Americans.”

The librarian of the to-be-closed Washington Village branch, the smallest in the system, carved out of two apartments in a public housing project, stood at the microphone in an elegant bright-red dress and said, “I am here to give voice to those in my library that have none. They have no Friends group, they don’t blog, they have no I-phone, no Smart Phone. They ask us librarians for help with forms, papers. They want to know how to get a free cell phone,” she said. “” It makes much more sense to close libraries in wealthy neighborhoods, where they have that technology at home, instead of those that don’t.”

A representative of the medical community, referring to a health-impact statement signed by 17 medical professionals, testified that closing libraries would have an adverse impact on public health because it would decrease access to health information, increase social isolation, and interfere with literacy skills.

City Councillor Charles Yancey, whose late mother was an ardent library advocate after whom the community room in the new Mattapan Library was named, stated unequivocally that he would not support library closings. “It’s insane in light of the violence in the city,” he said. Yancey recalled  the 1984 closing of the Eggleston Library, which he forced re-opened under the Ray Flynn administration. “That was my first victory” on the council, he said. Answering his own question where the funds will come from, Yancey said “we’ll use some of the reserves.”

Yancey was joined in his opinion by City Councillor Mark Ciommo, of Brighton, where an outraged group of voters is fighting the shuttering of the Faneuil branch. Ciommo, Yancey and Councillor Maureen Feeney were at the hearing until the end, as was Amy Ryan, BPL president. When Ciommo pledged he would “work with you to find the money” to keep libraries open, Ms. Ryan did not respond with enthusiasm.

At  Thursday’s City Hall Plaza rally preceding the library budget hearing before the City Council, several members of the Boston State Delegation loudly protested the proposed closings of four neighborhood libraries and the layoffs of dozens of library employees. They included South End Rep. Byron Rushing, who was joined by Reps. Linda Dorcena Forry and Gloria Fox under the threatening skies of a late-spring thunderstorm.

“The words above the Boston Public Library, FREE FOR ALL,  are carved in stone,” Rushing reminded a cheering audience of hundreds. “In granite, in fact. That is because they knew then that some day there would be a group of trustees like those we have now.” Rushing referred to the BPL trustees who last month voted to close four libraries in some of the poorest neighborhoods, including Washington Village, Lower Mills, Faneuil and Orient Heights.

He reminded the rally’s supporters that the library in his district, the South End Library, was not on the list to be closed. “And that is why I am here,” he said. “Because this is a test.”

Rushing agreed with an earlier speaker, a grade school student and library user from Brighton, who had told the audience just minutes earlier, “if they are going to close four libraries now, they will close another hundred later.”

“He’s right,” Rushing said. “That’s why we are here. This is a test.”