Barring a last-minute intervention, the Central Library
downtown will no longer offer Sunday hours. The library has been open from 1
p.m. to 5 p.m. on Sundays from October through the middle of May.
The downtown library includes both the Rundel and Bausch and
Lomb buildings on South Avenue, and is funded by Monroe County and New York
State. But the county has not increased its $6.62-million contribution in 11
years.
Calls to a county spokesperson were not returned.
The 11 library branches located throughout the city are
funded by City Hall and the state, and none are open on Sundays. That means
that city residents would not have access to library services at all on Sundays if the Central Library cut goes through.
“We’re eliminating access for all families in our city,”
said City Council member Elaine Spaull during a recent budget hearing.
Sunday is the Central Library’s most expensive day to
operate because the union contract requires staff to be paid overtime, said
Patricia Uttaro, director of the Monroe County Library System, during the same budget hearing. Sunday hours cost the library about
$104,000, says Sally Snow, MCLS assistant director.
The Central Library gets a lot of use on Sundays, she says.
During eight hours of operation on a normal weekday, approximately 2,637 people
use the Central Library, Snow says. That number on a normal, four-hour Sunday
is 703, she says.
“Sundays are a pretty big day, especially in our Local
History Division,” Snow says. “That is one of their busiest days. We have a lot
of amateur genealogists come in.”
Snow says that they’re trying to find money to open on a few
Sundays for special events.
“We may have a few here or there that we can do,” she says.
This article appears in Jun 10-16, 2015.
Let’s see. Sunday hours for the library run to $104,000 per year. So the Rochester Poverty Task Force that recently took in $500k in state taxpayer money (with more to come) could essentially fund nearly five years of Sunday operation for the central library.
What’s a better value for taxpayers – five years of Sunday operation for the library or a 150 person poverty “task force” staffed by the head of every major non-profit in Rochester angling for more public taxpayer money (above and beyond the usual donations) to keep their organizations viable with no evidence whatsoever that any of them collectively have actually done anything to “reduce poverty?”