Operations would suffer if Calgary Public Library budget is cut

CALGARY (660 NEWS) — During budget deliberations at Calgary City Hall on Wednesday, councillors voted to trim funding for the Calgary Public Library. They voted to make a $1 million cut in 2019, with a further $1.8 million in cuts for the following three years.

Two councillors, Druh Farrell and Evan Woolley, expressed opposition to the idea because it may result in a loss of some services.

Calgary Public Library CEO Bill Ptacek echoes those concerns.

“If these things aren’t covered in the budget, then we’re going to have to take money out of the operations of the library and then things like the hours the library is open, the outreach activities that we’re involved with, the school visits, the programming that we’re able to do at libraries to support people who are new to the country. A whole range of things that wouldn’t happen because we’d have to be covering these other necessary operational increases.”

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The proposed cuts come just after the new Central Library opened at the beginning of November, which has seen over 200,000 visits already. Over all 20 branches, there are over 7 million library visits in Calgary, with membership growing to over 700,000.

“This is not the time to kind of pull back on that, for really a limited amount of money,” said Ptacek. “But again, we want to be appreciative and understand that we’ve had great support, but we also would like to make sure that our city doesn’t miss an opportunity to take advantage of the position we’ve put the library in.”

He added that the organization is keeping in contact with councillors about the cuts, and it can be a whirlwind process to go through these debates, anyway.

“What they’re doing is fast and furious. And they really don’t have an opportunity to spend a lot of time thinking about all the areas that they’re working on, but I don’t know for instance they understand this isn’t about the Central Library, this is about the 20 libraries across the city.”

Ptacek is not pessimistic about the situation and holds out hope there will not be significant cuts — especially as there has been tremendous support in Calgary lately.

“Whatever they’re able to do for the library is great, we’ll make it work, but it would work so much better if we can continue the level of operations that we’ve had over the last couple of years.”