carolyn kellogg

With all of California facing a budget crunch, the city of LA is facing difficult cutbacks. The first round of funding cuts has been proposed — recommended by the city’s top budget official — and will be considered by the LA City Council on Monday. On the chopping block:

* $1.45 million from the $79-million library budget
* $800,000 from the city’s tree-trimming program
* $1 million from the crossing guards program
* $650,000 from the program to install more left-turn arrow signals at city intersections.
* A freeze on new hires at the City Attorney’s Office and City Controller’s Office, with limited exceptions
* $1.92 million from the Los Angeles Police Department program to replace older squad cars

Now I’m not a city budgeteer but I can see that the targets of many of these proposed cuts are things that are considered nonessential. And it kills me that in a big, difficult city like Los Angeles, where one in five children live in poverty, that anyone thinks that public libraries are nonessential.

Just yesterday I blogged at Jacket Copy about Andrew Carnegie and his libraries. Yes, Carnegie was a bad bad capitalist. But when he turned to philanthropy, libraries were one of his top priorities. Without his work, the US wouldn’t have a tradition of free libraries. And Carnegie cared about libraries because he saw them as one of the real ways that individuals could control their own destinies.

The new Malcolm Gladwell book, Outliers, seems to imply that individuals can’t. Fuck that. People are left out of the big fat clichéd-but-I-still-love-it American dream if we leave them out. If we cut off their resources — like free libraries.

I urge the City Council to not make any cuts at all to our library budgets. Period.

But if they must, here’s an idea: Make cuts to those in the wealthiest communities first.

Someone who lives in Beverly-Hills-adjacent Brentwood is better able to drive their car for library services than the bus-bound parents of kids in, say, El Sereno. People who live in Silverlake — where the median home price is still almost $600,000, more than $400 per square foot — can afford to buy the books they want. Leave the free libraries for the households earning the county’s average income of $36,687.

This would probably be politically stupid — affluent and engaged constituents might well protest losing library hours, library projects, library staff. But that just shows they want their libraries.

Libraries are important. And they should be available to the members of our community who have the fewest resources, the hardest fight, the farthest way to go.