SHEEPSHEAD BAY'S ONLY INDEPENDENT NEWS BLOG

Brooklyn Public Library officials and Mayor Michael Bloomberg have struck a deal to maintain a minimum of five day service at all branches, narrowly escaping devastating cuts that would have shuttered branches and eliminated hours across the board.

[ABOVE: Watch BPL Representative Mel Henkle tell Community Board 15 about the new hours, and thank the community for its advocacy.]

In our neck of the woods, the compromise means that some of our libraries will lose Saturday service beginning July 10, including the Sheepshead Bay, Gravesend and Homecrest branches. Saturday service will be provided at the Kings Bay, Kings Highway and Brighton Beach branches, and the Kings Highway branch will also have summer Sunday hours.

See the new hours for all Sheepshead Bay area libraries.

From the Brooklyn Public Library:

Brooklyn Public Library is facing a potential budget cut that could devastate our ability to provide Brooklynites with the materials and services they need. Should this budget cut take effect, library service would be drastically cut, affecting everyone who relies on us.Visit our website to get the full scope of these cuts. And let your elected officials know that you support BPL by signing the petition at your local library.

Back in May, Sheepshead Bites spoke up about the importance of neighborhood libraries as the city considered cutting a whopping $17.5 million dollars from the Brooklyn Public Library system. If those cuts passed, it would have ushered in a layoff of one of every six employees, reduced operational hours of most branches to five hours a day, five days a week, and caused a drop in available book, audio and video resources.

Luckily, with your help and the aid of countless others, the Brooklyn Public Library was able to stave off such a severe threat to its existence for at least another budget cycle.

But now a $7 million budget shortfall looms, and the Brooklyn Public Library is rattling the tin cup towards patrons. In an e-mail alert, the library writes:
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Tomorrow (December 12) the Sheepshead Bay Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library will be hosting music and poetry for your enjoyment! Yelena Litinskaya, Liana Alveradova, and Irina Aks will make you laugh with their humorous poems and Maksim Grachev will tug at your heart with opera arias and Russian romances!

The fun begins 2 p.m. at 2636 East 14th Street. Call (718) 368-1815 for more info.

Note: This event sounds like it will be a lot of fun — so much so, that we did this reminder post to make sure you don’t miss it!

Original post: Holiday Concert at BPL: Sheepshead Bay Branch

Brooklyn Public Library Executive Director Dionne Mack-Harvin testified at a City Council hearing last Thursday and pretty much confirmed everything we reported two weeks ago: the libraries are screwed if Bloomberg’s budget passes. Yet our City Council members are showing little opposition.

Just to reiterate, his dis-honor (Oh snap!) has proposed a budget that includes a $17.5 million cut to BPL. The cut will result in the loss of hundreds of jobs and a reduction in library hours by nearly half (five hours a day, weekdays only). Programs and new book purchases are sure to suffer as well.

Meanwhile, everyone’s cooing over some adorable little Canarsie girl’s plea to the mayor to save our libraries:

“If the library closes, where are we supposed to go?” she wrote in her two-page letter to Bloomberg.
“The only thing we will have to do is go home. And home is not as fun as the library. Home doesn’t have games, programs and books everywhere.
“Please keep my library open is all I say. Please keep it open everyday,” she went on. “If the library closes it will be all your fault.”

Adorable, but I doubt the mayor is listening.

It seems as if many of our city council members aren’t listening either. That includes Sheepshead Bay’s own representative Michael C. Nelson. I sent Nelson an email the day I wrote the original article asking him to oppose the budget. This was his response, which I received yesterday morning:
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Looking to learn a bit about writing mystery? Meredith Cole is coming to Sheepshead Bay Library to discuss her debut novel, Posed for Murder, a mystery set in Williamsburg, Brooklyn (and, really, what better setting for an imagined murder than the hipster-hood?).

The novel hit shelves last February, shortly after stealing the St. Martin’s Press/Malice Domestic “Best Traditional First Mystery” contest. Posed For Murder follows Lydia McKenzie, an art photographer who recreates murder scenes. After her gallery debut her models start turning up dead – posed in the positions she photographed them. To protect herself and her friends, McKenzie uses the skills she’s learned in her day job as an assistant to private detectives. Before writing novels and short stories, Cole directed films and wrote screenplays, so expect a cinematic flare to her words.

Word of warning, you may have to take a late lunch to attend this. For some reason, BPL coordinators thought it would be best to throw this shindig at 2:00pm on a weekday.

Where:
Sheepshead Bay Library
2636 E.14th street (btwn. Sheepshead Bay Rd. and Shore Pkwy)
(718) 368-1815
When: Wednesday, May 27th @ 2:00pm
Cost: Free

The Brooklyn Public Library system launched an online petition last weekend in an attempt to throw the brakes on a proposed $17.5 million budget cut. If passed the 20 percent cut would usher in a layoff of one of every six employees, reduce operational hours of most branches to five hours a day, five days a week, and cause a drop in available book, audio and video resources.

The cuts are tied to Mayor Bloomberg’s proposed executive budget, a four-year financial plan that seeks to close a $3.4 billion budget gap. But the mayor’s decision to shave off from the public library system to help the economy is logically twisted and ill-advised. During economic recession, libraries are an essential resource to a financial rebound. They provide education, career assistance, communication tools, and a center for community organizing. By giving space, internet access and job hunting tools, libraries serve many as both the soft pillow at the end of our deep plunge, and the ladder to getting us back up.

I know this because, when I lost my job last year, I spent many afternoons building Sheepshead Bites in the cool basement of the Sheepshead Bay library. It was a place to go and do work without the benefit of an office, and the internet access saved me money better spent on groceries. Sheepshead Bites owes a part of its existence to the little library on East 14th street.

Speaking of the Sheepshead Bay branch – an already dilapidated, suffering limb of an increasingly whithered tree – as the city drains the financial juices, it’ll no doubt be southern branches like ours that will pay the deepest price. And when it comes time to shutter doors – inevitable once people show they’re willing to accept cuts – ours will no doubt be high on the list.

Brooklyn Councilman Vincent Gentile, chair of the Libraries Committee, gets it. He beat out the BPL petition by a few days, putting one of his own on his website: www.vincentgentile.blogspot.com. “Mayor LaGuardia kept libraries open seven days a week during the Great Depression,” Gentile noted at a recent Community Board 10 meeting. “The more the economy gets worse, the more important the libraries become.”

So, please, help save our libraries by visiting Brooklyn Public Library and signing the petition. Then head to Councilman Gentile’s and sign his.