It’s just another band-aid. And it’s not even a good one at that. Rather more like those cheap, generic brand band-aids you buy 
at the dollar store.
But Miami-Dade Carlos “Cry Wolf” Gimenez, who didn’t listen to the people when they voted to increase their own taxes for improved animal services, has turned his other deaf ear to a community that has repeatedly told him “We value our libraries.”
A Miami-Dade Chamber of Commerce poll to be released later today will indicate that voters across the county — in every single commission district — support a tax increase in their library millage or tax rate, Ladra was told by a couple of sources. At least 400 calls were made in each district and support is across ethnic, racial and economic level lines.
Oh, Gimenez is not shutting any of them down completely. Or at least that’s what he says, because I keep hearing the Country Club of Miami branch is slated to be closed. He’s not cutting hours, as he had cried wolf ab0ut before. The mayor is simply firing 95 librarians or so and turning some full-timers to part-timers… but somehow spreading them out across the same facilities for the same number of hours?
Really? And he says he’s not a magician!
Read related story: Voila! Libaries are magically saved… but what else could be?
The Friends of the Miami-Dade Public Library and the mayor’s own library tax force have recommended that 
libraries be funded at the full $64 million they need to operate at current levels and continue to provide programs and current materials and new books. What a concept! And what about the new libraries in areas that need them, like Hialeah Gardens. They operated with a $53 million budget this year and that was shoestring. Advocates say we need room for growth. Bricks and mortar are already funded under the Building Better Communities general obligation bond but the operating budget and any reserves that can start to accumulate would pay for staff and materials for new branches in communities already identified with a large and growing need, like Hialeah Gardens.
Yet, earlier today, when the mayor went to the Miami Herald editorial board to discuss budget matters, he actually said he “wouldn’t know what to do with” a $64 million budget for libraries, according to a tweet from Doug Hanks, who was there. He’s either dumber than he looks or he thinks we are.
“Shocking” said Lynn Summers, a volunteer and advocate who has been leading the charge to inform the public, and the administration, about the library system’s funding needs and the services it provides.
“It has been explained to him ad nauseum, over and over again and in detail. We put it up on a website,” Summers said about the Coalition to Save Miami-Dade Public Libaries. “Maybe the air is thin on the 29th floor.”
Or maybe Gimenez could have spent a little more time in libraries growing up.
On Tuesday, Gimenez unveiled a budget that allocates only $45 million. And it would have been $42 mil if not for the fire department taxes he’s dipping into this year to make ends meet. Something Ladra has to look into and do “more on that later,” since some people live in the county library district but not the fire district (Coral Gables, Miami Beach, Miami) and some people live in the fire district but not the library district.
No matter. Because that $3 million is a drop in the bucket anyway that library advocates say makes no real difference — it just makes the mayor look good. Or less bad.
Summers said that hiring part timers requires the currently and now spread thin library staff to train and supervise entry level book clerks, let’s call them. My words, not hers. “You are disabling the system with that idea,” she said.
“It makes no sense,” said Terry Murphy, a board member of Friends of the Miami-Dade Public Library. “You’re going to have regional branches were you have one person who opens the door and closes the doors, but are you going to get any services? No.”
Most big metropolitan libraries, for example, order 40 or 50 copies of the latest best seller. In Miami-Dade, the purchases are in single digits and you’ll be on a waiting list for weeks to read it.
“People in Miami-Dade deserve to go to their library and get a current best-seller, not something from 2002,” Murphy said.
Well, actually, Gimenez — who won’t raise taxes to save someone’s life, literally — thinks libraries are moot. Their time has come and gone, in his view. He’s
practically said so on several occasions since they first came under his knife last year. They apparently were more useful to him in the years before that — as he quietly siphoned funds from library reserves and transferred library millage or tax dollars to the general fund. And they only survived the last budget process because — after dozens of people went up to the mic at the county budget hearing and said they would pay more taxes for libraries — Gimenez, in those eight hours, found money in the reserves to keep them all open.
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