Yes, Oakland City Council may very likely be in violation of Measure Q but I'd not be too quick and very cautious to file a law suit. While it sounds good on the surface, we do have a budgetary crisis. Suing the city would cost the city a lot of money. Who ends up paying for that? Oaklanders. We take money right out of our own pockets. The city has had a number of law suits recently and paid out millions in damages. That's money we could use for libraries, police, road repairs. We don't have enough money to do that already. We have to concentrate on getting what money there is allocated in better ways. Remember, libraries are only 3% of the City's budget. That comes out of the general fund. Look at the pie chart on page 3 of the attached document. What other places can money come from? There is not much room for shifting it around from one place to another.
I recently read that real estate is in even bigger trouble with properties being underwater at an all time high (62%) Property taxes are at an all time high. While it may seem that the City Council is being derelict in their duties (and I'm not saying that they aren't completely) they are also struggling with unprecedented shortfalls. We ALL need to get creative and understand the big picture, I believe. A lot of the taxes the city collects go to the state. The state's shortfall is even bigger and Prop 13 has state legislators hands tied in a big way. What we need is a gigantic tax reform in this state—one that reflects the current recession crisis. If we don't deal with that, all the tweaking to city budgets and squeaking about how thinly the bread has to be buttered won't cut it. The "butter" is being bled away from the cities and into the state coffers and there is less money due to large numbers of foreclosures and other shortfalls in state tax revenues. There is a lobby with big money that has always pushed Californians for restricting taxes and reducing the size of government. I'm talking about the folks behind Prop 13 and other propositions like this. Until we as Californians wake up and stop buying into their propaganda we'll just keep making a very bad situation become catastrophic. It's been happening for years and now the recession is tipping the scales and it is about to become a flood.
We are in for very tough economic times—like on the scale of the Great Depression—and we better start thinking smartly and creatively if we don't want another 1930's. I see history repeating itself and it is so avoidable if we just listen and learn. That's while I'm pushing to use what little money we have available to get creative and figure ways to weather the storm. Personally, I believe giving more of the pie to other city services and taking it away from libraries is a HUGE mistake. We need libraries more now than ever before. The difference this time around is computers and the Internet. Everything has become digitized and many are under the illusion that libraries are not as important as they used to be because people don't read books the way they used to.
Remember, we've discussed this in past Friends meetings: how do we get people to use the library when they don't read books anymore? And we have succeeded by redefining libraries. The role of librarians has changed and people see libraries in a different light now. Circulations are up. Patron visits are up. I've read that recently the upsurge is in part due to the recession with folks doing job research at the library after losing their job, a safe zone for both the unemployed and homeless, an inexpensive entertainment place for parents strapped for cash to send their kids. This is why we need libraries. We can NOT afford to be without them. Libraries will help us weather the storm. They give us the hope we all desperately need right now. We have to remember that and help educate others who don't understand this.
There are still a lot of people out there who have not been personally affected by this recession. They are nearly oblivious to what is going on around them. I know. I've got out of state family members and friends who live large like everything is status quo. Heck I know people right here in the Bay area who have not been impacted yet so they don't see it yet. We've got to get creative about this budget crisis and we've got to think and plan smart. It's easy to point fingers and cast (misplaced) blame when things don't go right. I know I've been guilty of that myself. So, what can we do to convince the mayor and city council that their budget strategy is flawed? We should be putting as much of what we've got into keeping our libraries strong and our city safe (police).
Librarians are highly intelligent people, so it is incumbent upon us to show others that we can do more with less. But we must needs have the proper, bare-bones basic tools to do the job. The city can and must learn to survive without many of the comforts we've come to be accustomed to. Libraries are not a luxury. They are a necessity that holds the framework of community and how to motivate citizens into making it a better place to live. We need libraries now more than ever before.
Benjamin Franklin realized this. That is why he started the first public library in this country. He had the forethought to realize that if we were to become a great nation, a populace with books and knowledge freely available to all its citizens was at the core of that great strength. Knowledge is power and we humans hold that knowledge in the written word. It is as simple as that. Look back at the past. Only clergy and the wealthy aristocracy could read and had books. Because of this, they had all the power over all the rest of humanity. Making books and knowledge available to everyone, teaching everyone how to read and write changed everything. If we don't hold on to that—and our libraries—we may well enter another dark age where the very wealthy are the only ones who can read and write and they will again have power over the rest of us.
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