PASSAIC PUBLIC LIBRARY
PASSAIC PUBLIC LIBRARY IN THE NEWS
The purpose of this page is to provide the public with a fair appraisal of the facts based on the information available. In cases where the newspaper article runs juxtaposed to the opinion of the Library Director and Board of Trustees you will see a highlighted box.
Passaic Library failed to act on critique
Monday, April 23, 2007 By MEREDITH MANDELL HERALD NEWS |
PASSAIC -- The Passaic Public Library has failed to follow through, or only partially accomplished, key recommendations that the State Library made in its evaluation of the city's library system in 2004.
The Herald News revisited that report in the wake of the Library Board's plan to shutter Reid Memorial Library and move a portion of its collection to the second floor of the Boys and Girls Club of Passaic.
Although the report did not did not specifically target the condition of the 104-year-old branch building on Third Street, it included a number of recommendations, including improving outreach to residents, especially Passaic's large Hispanic community; working from a strategic plan; improving communications with the city government; and hiring additional staff and upgrading facilities.
The library's board of trustees asked the State Library to do the evaluation to find alternatives to Council President Gary Schaer's and Mayor Samuel Rivera's plan to privatize the public library system, which ran into public opposition and was scrapped.
The three librarians from Trenton who conducted the evaluation wrote that the Passaic Library was "understaffed, under-funded and underperforming in relation to peer libraries both nationally and within New Jersey."
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The report suggested that the library should focus on several priorities, including the following: 1) Conduct a community analysis of the public library, and write a strategic plan for services, making the library relevant to the changing demographics; 2) Make strong efforts to improve communications with the city government, "which ultimately has primary funding responsibility for the library"; 3) Take full advantage of the resources offered by interloan networks, such as the Bergen County Cooperative Library System; 4) Provide services grounded in community needs developed with community input.
"They were not all that expensive, things that could have been done that wouldn't cost an enormous amount of money," said David Belanger, a library director for the Delaware County Library System in Pennsylvania and one of the evaluators. Things such as developing a coordinated public relations program, library representatives speaking to community groups and organizations, training for staff and board members and establishing a Friends of the Library to do fundraising.
Several citizens who use the library agreed that nearly four years later, the status quo remains or things have gotten worse. But library officials point to a long list of accomplishments since the state report. Executive Director Alan Bobowski said 70 percent of what the staff could accomplish, has been accomplished. Board President Craig Miller was traveling in Israel and was unavailable for comment.
Executive director cites progress
Bobowski said Friday that during his two-year tenure, the library has weeded out-of-date materials from the collection, repainted the library and reorganized it to become more user-friendly. In addition, the storage collection has been evaluated for usefulness, he said. In a report to the library board, Bobowski cited examples such as a 33 percent increase for the world language collection in the 2007-08 budget. He also pointed to 10 laptops bought for the tele-center, as part of a program to teach adults computer skills. Former Director Kathleen Mollica said that attempts were made to follow the state's recommendations before she retired in 2004. Namely, the Library Board picked the Ivy Group, a consulting firm out of Charlottesville, Va., to conduct a community survey, at a cost of $24,050.
The company completed the survey last July, but the board has yet to approve it, said Bobowski. When the Herald News requested a copy of the plan, under the Open Public Records Act, library officials said the plan was not completed.
"I don't see how they can use it (the strategic plan) if they haven't approved it yet," Mollica said. She also said that the community survey was not as far-reaching as the staff had initially thought it would be. For one thing, she said, the interviews did not include average citizens.
A list of the Ivy Group survey respondents, obtained by the Herald News, showed that the list included nonresidents such as Timothy Johnson, a manager at Valley National Bank, and Donna Schaer, the wife of City Council President Gary Schaer, who is a principal at a Passaic Yeshiva."It was a joke, the whole thing was a joke, these are all out-of-town people, what do they know about Passaic?" said Mark Auerbach, the former library board president.
The main point of the survey was to update the library's long-term goals, in concert with the city's significant demographic changes over the several decades. Since the last survey was completed in the mid-1980s, the Latino population has exploded to make up nearly 70 percent of the city's inhabitants. Library officials have said that the proposal to move the Reid Memorial Library's collection into an upstairs billiard room at the Boys and Girls Club of Passaic would mean better service for children, and would include buying a bookmobile that will provide an additional 20 hours of service to the Eastside neighborhood.
But several community leaders questioned whether the library board's plans are congruent with the needs of the community. "I don't know how they are going to reach out to the Latino community by getting this bus (the bookmobile)," said Marisa Villanueva, an English as a Second Language teacher at Passaic High School.
Lorenzo Hernandez, executive director of the Hispanic Information Center of Passaic, said he opposed shuttering the Reid, although he felt it's not simply an ethnic issue. "The whole community will be impacted," he said. "What affects anyone, affects all of us, it's our loss or our gain."
Library supporters also said that Schaer and Rivera have taken little, if any, interest in the public library -- contrary to the State Library report's counsel that the city give more attention to the library as a critical public institution for education and assimilation. Neither Schaer nor Rivera has attended a library board meeting since the plan to close the Reid came to light. Rivera has refused to comment for several months on the board's plan to close Reid. Although Rivera appoints board members, and the chairwoman of the committee to evaluate the Reid plan, Angela Ramirez, works for him at city hall, Keith Furlong, his spokesman, has claimed "the mayor has no input on the matter."
Schaer has said it is not his place to mettle in what is "the library board's decision."
"They did not go through much effort to save the library because the mayor and all the other authorities thought it would be a good idea to dump it," said Resident Blanche Nadick, who volunteers at the library as an ESL tutor.
Antagonism against library alleged
Reference librarian and union representative Jean Ellis said the debate over privatization, which she opposed, showed the city's antagonism toward the library. She recalled how Rivera, as a councilman, once suggested closing the library and giving every child in the city an encyclopedia instead. Ellis said the library needs to hire a staff person to focus on its relationship with city officials, as the State Library report recommended. "I have always felt we need another person on staff to do just that, public relations, outreach, contact local government people," she said.
Passaic has a significantly lower number of library staff compared with North Jersey cities of about the same population, just below 70,000. East Orange, for example, has 53.2 staff, compared with Passaic, at 16.8, according to 2004 New Jersey Public Library statistics. Bobowski said the staff numbers have not changed much from 2004.
In the wake of public outcry about the Reid, Bobowski said he has made appointments to see city Business Administrator Greg Hill and has attended more council meetings. He said there are few grants available, but he has begun to look into state historical preservation grants for the Reid.
If the library wants to make a serious attempt to apply for grants to renovate the Reid library, officials must approve the strategic plan, said Paterson Library Director Cindy Cezak, who said her library is putting together its own plan. "For any large-scale renovation and historic preservation project, you have to demonstrate you have a strategic plan and how it fits into it," she said.
Library users on Friday at the Julius Forstmann Library called the library staff "outstanding" but expressed general disappointment with the library's services.
Keith Kusinko, 40, said that some of the collections in the sports section have books that he remembers from when he was in high school and that the new books and bestsellers collection seemed far thinner than Clifton's. "It's just disappointing; we are not getting more funding and more information," he said.
Resident Ephraim Goldman, an occasional volunteer for the library, said the city needs to be more decisive about its support for the library, calling it "one of the most important factors in the education of its citizens."
"Everything in life is a choice; which is more important, cleaning the streets or the library?" he asked. "Let the streets go dirty for a couple of days."
Reach Meredith Mandell at 973-569-7100 or mandell@northjersey.com.