2 Towns Weigh Privatizing Libraries
Already, some towns across Massachusetts are charging for school sports, cutting school bus service, and imploring voters to raise property taxes. But now, in an unprecedented move in the state, two communities are considering proposals to privatize their libraries.
The separate privatization proposals in Tewksbury and Dartmouth are still in the early stages, but the idea is nonetheless stunning advocates in a state where towns often put the word free in the name of their library.
The general approach would be to turn over the library’s day-to-day operations to private companies. The idea, which would need approval by the towns in each case, could also put the libraries at risk of losing state funding.
Celeste Bruno - a spokeswoman for the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners, which certifies public libraries - said Tewksbury and Dartmouth would be the first communities in Massachusetts to privatize their libraries. She said the library commissioners would oppose any such move.
“There is a huge difference between a private, for-profit company and a library which essentially belongs to the community and answers to every resident in the Commonwealth,” Bruno said.
Privatized libraries are not unheard of in other states. A Maryland-based company, Library Systems and Services LLC, called LSSI, runs 65 library branches in four states: Oregon, Texas, Tennessee, and California, according to Dean McCausland, LSSI president.
In a telephone interview, he said LSSI relies on taxes and grants, but not fees, to run the libraries and turn a profit for the company. LSSI generally does not hire unionized employees, helping it to save on benefits packages.
Both Tewksbury, northwest of Boston, and Dartmouth, in the southeastern part of the state, have been struggling to keep up with the rising costs of municipal government while keeping taxes relatively low. Both towns are facing possible property tax overrides.
In Tewksbury, officials have told voters they will face deep municipal budget cuts this year unless they pass a series of tax overrides, including one for about $5.3 million. A date for the override has not been set, said Town Manager David Cressman.
Budget-balancing proposals include imposing user fees to fund all high school athletics, senior center services, and trash collection, as well as library privatization.
“They’re all lousy ideas, but so is going broke,” said Jay Kelley, chairman of Tewksbury’s Financial Planning Task Force.
Kelley said task force members unanimously approved investigating library privatization after a resident suggested the idea.
Dartmouth is also investigating whether to draw up a contract with LSSI, said Denise Medeiros, the town’s library director.
Medeiros said that a subcommittee of the town’s Finance Committee is exploring privatization of other services as well, including the Department of Public Works.
Medeiros said she does not see privatization as an answer to the town’s budget problems, because the library would still rely on local tax dollars to operate.
Finances have been so shaky that the town has already closed one of its three library branches permanently and another branch temporarily, Medeiros said.
On April 1, the town’s voters will consider six tax override questions.
One of those measures, raising $250,000, would help cover the library budget, which is $878,196 this year.
Robert Ferrari of Tewksbury said he believes that private companies are held to stricter standards.
“I’m pro-privatizing as much of government as possible,” said Ferrari, who runs a local blog about issues in Tewksbury.
“The government cannot run anything that a business couldn’t do better.”
At the two-story brick library, built in 1999, patrons voiced their concern about privatization.
Shannon O’Neil, 19, on spring break from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, said she has no Internet access at her home in Tewksbury and needed the library to study for a biology course. Said O’Neil: “The library’s public, so everyone can use it.”
Connie Paige can be reached at cpaige@globe.com.
© 2008 The Boston Globe
This country is going down the toilet fast. Our schools have become impoverished, and now our libraries? This is Reaganomics at it’s worst.
It feels like a foretaste of the future. More to come.
kathyodat
Sounds like a splendid plan. One simply buys less books in order to cover the necessary corporate profits. With less books, less shelves are needed and less employees to sort them. Why can’t people understand the efficiency in this? Also, some libraries will actually have 2 books about the same president, for instance, and if he was a ‘minor’ president such as Hoover or Carter, do we even need that book?
We could have a library with nothing but those Time Life books they used to sell on TV. You know, the Old West ones about the outlaw who was so mean he once shot man just for snoring. And the great thing is that if profits went down, they could cancel at any time.
Libraries are not supposed to be about making a profit. They don’t sell or rent anything. The money comes from taxpayers and LSSI makes money by reducing hours of operation and eliminating workers and benefits and services.
In Jackson County, Oregon, we have LSSI running our system now. Our County Commissioners chose to use county money that had been allocated for Libraries for public safety instead and closed the libraries. Finally, they sold us out to the lowest bidder, LSSI. They did not hire back all the employees and were reluctant to recognize their union. Any money made goes to this private corporation and not back in to the public library system. The taxpayers bought the books, we paid for the buildings but LSSI sends the profits out of the county.
That isn’t all that gets sent out. Many people like to donate their old books to the library so others may also enjoy them. LSSI will not accept as many now because every book has to be sent out of state now for processing before it can be put in circulation. This costs ten dollars a book so now they are particular which books they accept. Any they don’t accept get sold by Friends of the Library for a wee amount. This doesn’t sound that efficient to me. I won’t be donating books to the library anymore.
I have been going to our libraries regularly for years and occasionally I forget a book or lose one and I accumulate fines. The library workers are very nice about this and I always pay it off so as not to lose my ability to check out more. For the first time ever we got a notice from a collection agency for overdue fines. Only a month had passed while we had been looking under the beds and behind the couch. We did find the book and paid the fines but were appalled at how quick LSSI was to involve a collection agency. Clearly money is their main concern, not serving the people that hired them.
I hope these towns don’t go with LSSI. I wish we could go back to having a real public library in Jackson County.
We are going backwards.
I live across the street from the main library branch in downtown Louisville, KY. My youngest niece asked me while on a visit, “why is it called Louisville Free Public Library?” which is engraved in the stone of the 1906 landmark building.
The explanation is that before that time, most libraries were private, and not free, as in no free access to “everyone in the community.”
Going back to those old times seems perfectly in line with bushianity.
There are two key things going on here. Attacks on public schools and attacks on public libraries. And both are essentially attacks on democracy.
Once upon a time people in this country knew that to have a democracy you had to have an educated citizenry. Public schools and public libraries are both a step in that direction. Both are now under attack, and have been for awhile, by forces that essentially want to destroy democracy.
How can you understand that your government and the media are lying to you about some place like Iraq when your schooling was so insufficient that you can’t even find the country on the map? At least the libraries provide a back up on that in that once you realize you don’t know shit and you decide you need to learn, you can at least go to the library and learn on your own.
For fun, go back to these same governments that say they can’t finance libraries and look at the amount of money being spent on police, courts and prisons. Or look at the state level and see where the state (or the feds) are providing grants to these municipalities. What that will reveal is the priorities. Its not that there’s no money at all. Its that the money is being spent on something else.
Or, for the $150 billion a year or so we spend on Iraq, or for the $1 trillion a year we spend on defense and intelligence, how many libraries could we fund?
Hi sLiMsHaDy
Cool story! At least to me. My background is that my grandmother was a librarian in the “Louisville Free Public Library” system!
When someone asks me why I’m always reading and always seem to have a book around me, that’s the reason I give …’well, I’m the grandson of a librarian!’ I always thank her spirit for setting me on a good course in this world.
Don’t know what branch you are near, but she used to be the librarian (probably 30 years ago now) for the Bardstown road branch. Back some 40 or so years ago you’d have seen me running around that branch as a little kid when my family went up to Louisville to go visit her and the rest of the family.
Welcome to America everyone. Land of the free, home of the brave…
Hmmm…
Not so much after all. To the modern American, free means free to sell out to the lowest bidder. To the modern America, brave means giving shrub and its cohort complete power to “protect” them from the bad men in the desert.
I suppose it is our just deserts to end up with this whimper. After all, over the years we have done nothing at all to stop the encroachment of the fascists and now they will see to elimination of our ability to be informed on this basic level.
Free markets: Free to destroy the social contract we have with each other.
I’ve worked in libraries, public and academic, for almost 20 years. It’s astounding to see the direction our country is headed. Even in the Carnegie heyday a century ago, when libraries depended heavily on wealthy private philanthropists, there was no doubt that they were public libraries. With leadership like the sort we have now, who needs Al-Qaeda to wreck our institutions, rule of law, engineering & IT expertise, science, national image, economics, etc? It’s as if we’ve been taken over by hostile forces or something, wholly inimical or malevolent, to this country’s own institutions.
I should add, also, that in my 23 years in the civil service and higher education, I’m led to suspect that privatization and “public-private partnership” are euphemisms for kickbacks or some other nefarious vendor/contractor selection process.
For-profit companies have to spend X in order to accomplish some job. In order to make a profit, they need to charge the government X+Y. Now can someone tell me why the public institution cannot — itself — do the job for X and SAVE the expense of Y that goes to the private contractor?
From what I’ve seen, there is sometimes a deliberate monkeywrenching going on in public service, deliberately mismanaging things, so that they may then argue that it needs to be outsourced. For instance, if you make a team of a dozen facilities managers, have weekly meetings, debates, etc. and only screw in that lightbulb after 6 months of deliberation — then you can argue that a private janitorial service may do it more cheaply. But that gross mismanagement of resources must happen first. That M.O. is easy to spot. Most of their techniques are here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-patterns.
The most common I’ve seen is Fruitless Hoops.
Believe me, it’s frustrating as hell to be in a situation where you KNOW you could manage things more efficiently — you can practically smell a better solution — but are forbidden from that capacity.
Okay, since the world isn’t working anymore I propose we try giving the decision making powers of government to a rotating random series of grade seven classes. Every three months a new class is chosen at random throwing darts at balloons. Things would be chaotic for a while, yes, but in time we might find ourselves in that green crayon happy world with the crooked rainbow that I wanted to be in when I was a kid - the one where we use the resources of the land to feed and house the people and we play a lot.
Well, ultimately we need to quit writing and start acting.
This is just wrong.
In MY America, public libraries are an entitlement, not an expense.
Is the concept of privatization mean that they will hire employees at slave wages, give them no benefits, cut their hours? Then when the library is still not running at a profit, cut the hours of operation, cut the book buying budget? Then, in the end, shut the library entirely?
“enemyofthepeople” blog above says it all.
This is sad, sad, sad.
Why wasn’t I surprised to find out that Texas was one of the first states to go for privatized libraries?
To me libraries are as sacred as church!
I started working a public library as a book shelver while in high school, and 15 years later was a programmer at a Big-10 research library. My wife began as a clerk and became a public librarian (earning the professional master’s degree). In order to attract a good staff you need to offer a reasonable salary and benefits package.
So the chief downside to competing with whoever will work for minimum wage and no benefits (spiral to the bottom) — you’ll get disinterested, non-professional, and terrible help. People who might just as well be working at the local fast food franchise next door. As an aside, public librarians typically need a master’s degree in many metropolitan areas, but the salary is more miserable than teaching.
So a word of advice to anyone considering a career in libraries: unless our country’s culture changes, or you are independently wealthy, DON’T.
So, no one bothered to actually look up LSSI or what they have done before?
First, the libraries remain free and open to everyone.
“Our schools have become impoverished, and now our libraries?”
Convince your fellow taxpayers to pay more and make a large gift to the library yourself.
The real problems are the bloated salary and pensions we pay.
Did you know that the Dartmouth Library spends over 75% its budget on salaries and benefits, and LESS THAN 14% on books?
“Sounds like a splendid plan. One simply buys less books in order to cover the necessary corporate profits. With less books, less shelves are needed and less employees to sort them.”
Actually, the company would be contractually obligated to spend MORE on books and materials and to maintain hours of operation.
What are these “profits” you talk about? The library doesn’t generate any profits! If its costing $5 million to run a library, and LSSI comes in and offers to run it for $4 million while providing at least as good service, where do we lose? We pay less and still get great service. It’s up to LSSI to find their profits, WITH SERVICES MAINTAINED.
I read about Jackson County, OR. So you’re SOO upset with the way LSSI is running the library. Tell me, how did you like your library before LSSI took over? Oh, that’s right, they were closed 24/7 indefinitely.
Finally, if the book budget is the same or increasing, contractually, and the hours don’t go down, and services are maintained, AND we pay less for it, how do we lose??
If you can regulate it so that the Government
will guarantee them a profit, the Bushco Corp callled “The Carlyle Group” will buy it.
How much does LSSI pay you Katek?
so it’s better to go ad hominem than to discuss the issues?
Paul Bramscher March 20th, 2008 1:44 pm For-profit companies have to spend X in order to accomplish some job. In order to make a profit, they need to charge the government X+Y. Now can someone tell me why the public institution cannot — itself — do the job for X and SAVE the expense of Y that goes to the private contractor?
They can, but the fascists don’t make any money off that.
And what non-social service local gov’t payouts could be redirected to help the people, not the gov’t itself, me wonders? Gov’t like to think of themselves as perpetual motion machines.
katek
Where have you been lately?
Enron, Hallburton, Exon, Carlyle, Blackwater, …the list goes on and on.
Why is it that these deregulated, and/or privatized ventures evetually come to the government to bail them out?
Why do they run things so miserably?
The problem with government contracting private firms to produce public outputs are:
1. the huge possibilities for corruption, kickbacks, lack of effective community input, no protection for whistleblowers, corporate lobbying to deregulate industry and limit liabilities and other methods of keeping them accountable, deunionization and de-powering employees, destruction of local power by national or international firms, etc. 2. when these institutions fail or don’t produce public outputs, we have to bail them out 3.the CEOs increasingly gobble up more and more of the operating budget for both personal use and remuneration.
To actually make sure privatized organizations do not fall prey to the above abuses, the government has to eventually spend many more dollars for constructing, maintaining and protecting an oversight bureaucracy than it orginally paid for when it was a government operations.
One would think people would learn.
Privitization, to be accountable and protect the rights of citizens, requires a huge regulatory bureaucracy
I am incredulous that these two towns would give up the basis for a functional democracy to save a couple of bucks on property taxes. The public library and quality public education are symbolic and real life necessities for an informed citizenry. Even one that is becoming economically impoverished still has some hope with education. The public library is too important to be sold off to some private vendor. It is selling the best chance for betterment of the declining middle class. It puts the neocon agenda closer to its dream one town at a time. Kind of like the antiabortion movement. Slow, patient, relentess and wrong.
This is a grand idea. One obvious savings is that instead of trained librarians, they can just hire untrained people. Also, not only could we pay them less than we pay the government parasites, we also would not have to take care of any retirement or health care for them which would mean additional savings. There would also be the possibility of keeping their hours sufficiently low so that we could eliminate any vacation pay–another savings.
“why is it called Louisville Free Public Library?” which is engraved in the stone of the 1906 landmark building…”
An old public school buildings neat my house until recently in Pittsburgh - built in the Carnegie/Swab/Frick robber baron days - has engraved in the long sandstone fascia over its front entrance, now weathered and hard to read:
“Dedicated to the Cause of Public Education - A Cornerstone of Democracy”
“In a telephone interview, he said LSSI relies on taxes and grants, but not fees, to run the libraries and turn a profit for the company. LSSI generally does not hire unionized employees, helping it to save on benefits packages.”
Jesus. So instead of public money going to properly-paid employees, who spend that money in the local community, it goes to wealthy CEOs living in another state, who put it into overseas investments.
I see this over and over here in Canberra - public money financing pyramids of executives, because private enterprise is “efficient”. It actually isn’t.
Ask Atlanta Georgia about privatizing. They did the water system. In a few short years the water was unsafe to drink, the facility neglected and the water too expensive. They returned it to public control to fix it.
Some things can be privatized but if the goal is to save money - only it has a low chance of success when it is a universal service. Another layer of management is added to the process that must be paid.
Paying lower wages has been no answer to any problem the US has. Adjusted for inflation, wages are down substantially and tax cuts and perpetual war touted to boost the economy clearly don’t work for 95% of the population. Deregulation has caused a collapse in the housing market and banking business.
Where is the evidence that any neocon or Republican economic theory can be supported? The nations with the best education, longest lives, and lowest crime rates have done the exact opposite of Republican dogma.
Mr. Ferrari of Tewkesbury is obviously a true Neocon. He wants government reduced in size so that it is small enough to drown in the bathtub. Free, public libraries are part of the foundation of our democracy. Perhaps he grew up with lots of excess money and a silver spoon firmly in his mouth, but I did not. The town library was a gold mine of information and enjoyment. I guess if we continue down the path begun with Mr. Reagan we will soon have nothing left for the citizenry. We will each and every one of us been turned into the perfect little consumers, just as the neocons envision. Off course most won’t have enough money to buy books and magazines, but that’s what they are counting on…minds turned to mush!
In a nutshell, it’s getting to the point where some managers, whether actively hostile or incompetent (no consequence) just need a kick in the pants and a removal from their decision-making capacity.
One more comment on libraries — in my experience public libraries are basically pawns of the county board, which is a kickback recipient of developers. Case in point — St. Paul public library was built in the 19-teens. Restored and still operating 90 years later. Suburban libraries go through new iterations every 10 years or so. Build, build, build, and always near a shopping mall. What’s a library manager to do when the library board is hand-picked by the county board, which answers to the commissioners, who are all on the take from developers?
The rapid privatisation of public libraries now underway, is reminicent of the S&L bustouts that occured back in the Reagan80’s. Like the S&L scam, the libraries are turned over to freebooters-Private Corporations who operate using the “bare bones approach’ (skeleton operations, `efficiently” strip the library of its re$ource$ while conning the authorities. Eventually with all the loot gone, they close up shop and move onto the next town ripe with suckers ready to be fleeced. Baaaaaaaaaah
Who needs books? Books are dangerous, with our young getting dangerous ideas?
Ban, burn books.
Subscription to Fox will be compulsory and everybody will be happy (except those who die in uniform, a number expected to increase dramatically under the no-books regimen).
I am a federal librarian, and the creeping privatization of our libraries has worried me. I remember, in the 90s, I would be coerced by my management into relying upon commercial “sponsorship” to help pay for children’s programs, e.g. our Summer Reading Program. As a result, I was forced to hand out Summer Reading Program materials with fast-food logos printed on them. We live in the golden age of euphemisms and obfuscatory language. “Privatization” and “outsourcing” are euphemisms for selling what belongs to all of us to a private business or corporation for their profit. Once they own the libraries, you can be sure they will eventually control the content, and that will be the end of the free forum of ideas that our precious public libraries represent.
If Ben Franklin could see this he would be disgusted. As the originator of the first public library in the colonies it was his goal to democratize both the access to and availability of knowledge.
This is the ultimate pubilc education and life-long learning. But in a planter-industrialist/peasent-serf society who needs to understand anything except to keep on working for “massa” to produce wealth for his pleasure.
The other question is, if libraries are privatized, who decides what books are on the shelves? Right now, I can find books on controversial subjects including politics. If a corporate power is in control of libraries, what will be available to read? Will there be censorship? Libraries and internet sites allow us to have a view of the world other than the standard one. If both are threatened, what do we do?
This privatization craze is an ominous threat to individual freedom, the concept of public service, and the ability of the public to learn. Private companies have profit, not public service, as their bottom line. Libraries, like water, should be provided by government at public expense.
This absolutely enrages me. It’s stupider than the invasion of Iraq. I don’t know what I would do about this if it comes to my library. I see this as a tax on people who read and a discrimination against intelligence.
It’s George Bush, the pig and the symbol, and all he reflects in the American people. It’s about The Pursuit of Ignorance, America’s gift to the world, a nuclear armed and extremely stupid, raging ignoramus. I’m so happy and proud to be a part of this and to pay for it all.
Too angry to think clearly or write any more.
Oh, yes, and it’s all aobut corporate control, keeping track of what I read, presuming that whatever I read is something that I subscribe to or advocate as well, deciding for me what I should read.
It’s absolutely disgusting to have to live here among Americans. I’m too old to emigrate. I should have left decades ago. Disgusting.
Why do we fall for the fiction that a company can do the job for less and have money left over for a profit? Ever notice that Dilbert works for a corporation and not for a government entity? The great engine of “private enterprise”; yes, the same one that is currently asking the Feds to bail out their sorry sub-prime loans?
Privatized libraries; solidifying corporate control over what we are allowed to read.
Well, it should send a message that the Betas in these organizations should find ways to subvert the attempts at destroying public institutions by their managers.
At the University of Minnesota we’ve recently signed a closed-room deal (I don’t even know who was in the room) to ship tens of thousands of books to Google for scanning. Several big academic and public libraries are doing this. Our director once defined privatization as “doing things for personal benefit, rather than benefit of the organization.” Curious definition from the most highly-paid person on staff. This is step #1.
Step #2 will go as follows. Google will get full-text of everything (and of course it tracks reading/access usage, perhaps in perpetuity). Now that Google has all this material, so easily available, the neocons will argue why do we have these old public institutions known as libraries? Why not sell the books and start phasing the buildings out?
Step #3 is more interesting. No, I don’t think I want to write about that just yet.
“…built in the Carnegie/Swab/Frick robber baron days -”
Yes! That is exactly who; Carnegie of he old robber barons, had the histroic, vintage, downtown library in Louisville, KY, built in 1906.
Hey COMarc. I have been here for 5 years now. It’s a great city.
The right wing economics of Reagan and Friedman is not dead. The lie that the private sector does it best in any area of the economy when compared to government is THE BIG LIE. Just remember economic history Chrysler had to be bailed out for 10 billion and today Bear Stearns for 30 billion or more. Certain functions of a civilized society require government support, one of those remain public libraries, which give access to citizens to knowledge. And as Wilhelm Liebknecht, the German socialist said: Knowledge is Power, and Power is Knowledge. Keep fighting the greedy contracting out contractors and their pals. Peace, gene debs