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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. It's been more than a month now since New Yorkers said goodbye to Sunday service at public libraries. The decision to make cuts to the city's libraries is one Mayor Adams admits was difficult, but he says he had no choice and that it would save the city $23 million amid the migrant situation.

If there's any silver lining, it's that the mayor was able to spare libraries further cuts in the preliminary budget that he announced this week for the next fiscal year, which begins in July. Now, many of you know that New York City's libraries don't just lend out books or host important archives. They help to narrow the digital divide by offering free internet access. Access to afterschool programs also vary by school, so many children will get themselves to the nearest library while they wait for the parents to get back from work. Let's not forget about language services.

Despite the vital services libraries offer, their budgets seem to be in the crosshairs whenever there's a downturn in the city's financial outlook. We'll talk about what these cuts mean for libraries and the communities they serve at the granular and community level now with Lauren Comito, executive director of Urban Librarians Unite and a long-time librarian. Lauren, thanks for coming on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Lauren Comito: Thank you so much for having me.

Brian Lehrer: By way of introduction, do you want to say a bit about your work at Urban Libraries Unite and as a librarian in one of the city's library systems?

Lauren Comito: Yes, so Urban Librarians Unite is a worker advocacy organization for urban library workers across the country. We do professional development. We just put out a study on trauma in urban public library workers, and we bring people together to have conversations about their work. Also, we fight budget cuts when they happen like this year and last year.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we're going to open the phones for any other librarians listening right now. First priority, and any library users, call and say what the loss of Sunday service has meant to you, if anything or anything else. 212433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Lauren, what did Sunday service mean to the community your library serves?

Lauren Comito: Sunday service is, for a lot of people, the only time that they can make it to the library. It is very much a time when people who work like the 9:00 to 5:00, Monday to Friday can actually come in and use the services with their families or to take care of business they couldn't do during the week. Taking that time away means that that's less time they have to get that done.

Brian Lehrer: Adams insisted that he did not mandate that libraries close on Sundays. He merely saw the need for cuts, and this is the way the libraries decided to apply them. Here's 30 seconds of what the mayor said at a news conference this week.

Eric Adams: The libraries had the decision to determine how they were going to do their pegs. They made the determination of taking away those weekend services. They made the decision of doing that. We thought that was too draconian and we held them harmless, but they have to make the decisions. This is an all-hands-on-deck moment of, some of them have almost $1.5 billion in endowment. Come on. We got to all step up.

Brian Lehrer: He's blaming the libraries for unnecessarily, in his view, closing the branches on Sundays as opposed to making some other cuts of efficiency, I guess. As far as you are aware, did the city's libraries have other options that made Sunday closures more optional than mandatory?

Lauren Comito: I heard that press conference. I've been a librarian in New York City since 2006. I went through the Bloomberg years where we had cuts every year for such a long time. One of the things the libraries really did during that time was tighten up the efficiency of the operations to the point where the libraries are very efficient.

If we're cutting funding to libraries, we are cutting services. There isn't extra stuff to take out. If you cut money from the libraries right now, it's cutting book budgets and staffing levels and maintenance. We got so very good at doing more with less over the last 15 years or so that, at this point, we can only do less with less. There is no magical efficiency thing that's going to make Sunday service possible without the funding that we had before.

Brian Lehrer: It must be so exhausting, like whenever it becomes clear that the city will make cuts, libraries and the people who staff them always seem to be close to the top of the list, and until this time, usually, the funding gets restored. Does it feel to you like your budgets are perpetually in the crosshairs, and if you agree with that characterization, what kind of professional environment does that create for you and your colleagues?

Lauren Comito: Well, yes, absolutely. This is my third mayor doing this. To some extent, I think a lot of us have gotten really good at talking about what we do because, for many people, they don't know what the libraries do now. They don't know that we are teaching ourselves Spanish so that we can help people use the computers to get their asylum paperwork in. They don't know that we do summer meals or that we connect with teachers to provide the books they need for their curriculum.

They just think people come in and borrow books and leave. One of the things we really need to do is just do a really good job of telling people what we really do all day, which is build our communities and create a space for people to come together around learning and the human story, but, oh, it's so frustrating. It is exhausting. I could do so much if I didn't have to do this every year, but it's important enough that I need to do it and we all need to do it.

Brian Lehrer: Victoria in Queens, you're on WNYC with Lauren Comito, executive director of Urban Librarians Unite. Hi, Victoria.

Victoria: Hi. Good morning. I was in the shelter for several years, and I will tell you that the library, for some of us, was like our refuge, our place to go for learning, for quiet, to get online in order to work with the government, and find a job. When you remove that from us, you're really detrimentally hurting our life quality.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. A testimonial from someone who was in the shelter system, Lauren, and how vital the library was to her. We know how much in the news the shelter system is right now with well 100,000 New Yorkers, including some recent migrants and a lot of longer-term New Yorkers having to be housed that way.

Lauren Comito: Thank you, Victoria. It's actually really great to hear people who have come out of shelter and use the libraries in that way because one of the things that I always try to do is learn everyone's name because it's so important that all of our neighbors know that they're welcome and that people experiencing homelessness are absolutely welcome in our libraries and we want them there and that they're part of our community too. That is something that gets taken away. There's a snowstorm today. If this snowstorm was happening on Sunday, that's another space that people can't spend time in, and maybe they have to be outside or somewhere where they're not as welcome.

Brian Lehrer: That caller spent time in a shelter and used the libraries to great effect at that time. Here's a comment from a listener writing a text message to us about the other end of the economic spectrum. Text says, "Rich people don't use libraries. If they did, there would be no cuts." Do you agree with either the premise or the conclusion?

Lauren Comito: No. Actually, there's a lot of libraries in New York City where that is a place where people who are on either end of the economic spectrum end up in the same place together. People with more money absolutely use libraries. They may use eBooks and may not come in as much, but I absolutely spend a lot of time in my day-to-day job, navigating the different needs between different populations and making sure that everyone has their needs met the best we can. It's this equalizer where people can be together who wouldn't otherwise.

Brian Lehrer: How about these 100,000 plus-- mayor yesterday, I think I saw the Deputy Mayor on TV, Sheena Wright, saying 170,000 of recent arrivals since the current wave began early last year, most of them are not in the shelter system, by the way, but that's another show, but around 70,000 of them are. A lot of other people have found their own housing, but that's 170,000 new New Yorkers in the last two years. Do you find many of them using the libraries? Are the libraries serving them in particular ways?

Lauren Comito: Oh, absolutely. In my day job, which I've said, one of the city libraries, I do pop-ups and storytimes in one of the city shelters, in Spanish, which I've had to learn. I can speak Spanish about as well as a four-year-old. That's helpful for a storytime. People absolutely use the library. We've been able to make people library cards.

I know several families who spend every day after school in a library, getting books either in their language or in English to learn English because they're adorable. We sing together, it's great. They're just more neighbors, people move in and out of New York City all the time, and become New Yorkers in various ways all the time. They use the libraries just as much as everyone else does.

Brian Lehrer: Wendy in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Wendy.

Wendy: Oh, hi. How are you? Just calling, the libraries are very important to me. I'm wondering why another day wasn't considered for the closure because I agree that working people have to come on Sundays, and also, why the decision to eliminate overdue fines was made. I don't know how much income that generated. Thanks.

Brian Lehrer: Wendy, thank you. Two good questions. Yes, restaurants and stuff close on Mondays because they're going to be the slowest. Did you consider a random weekday instead of Sunday?

Lauren Comito: Well, urban librarians doesn't make the policy for the libraries, but not all libraries were open on Sunday. It is an expensive proposition to be open on Sunday because we are union workers, and it is time and a half and voluntary. In addition to that, if we want kids to be able to go to a library after school, then we need to be open on school days. That ends up being why the weekends get considered first. It's because that safety period after school for children, for them to have a place to go is vital to the fabric of our community.

Brian Lehrer: Another question was, and we did a segment on this when it was announced with one of the library heads, getting rid of overdue fines. I guess, the premise of Wendy's question is, that denies the library systems a needed revenue source.

Lauren Comito: It kind of, but it's not enough. It was never enough money every year to make up for $58.6 million of a cut, and it was a barrier for a lot of people. I can't tell you how many people have put off returning books that were late because they were ashamed of it, and they've come in, it's like abjectly apologizing for their books being late. We don't want that. We want people to feel welcome, and like they can come back.

When you have late fees that build up for, say, children who can't necessarily take themselves to the library, and so we're not really responsible for the books being late because we don't let children wander the streets by themselves, then they can't use the library because their fees have built up. It's not entirely fair to kids. It's not fair to people who can't afford those fines, and then don't get to access the services that everyone else gets to access to make their lives better. It's not fair to workers arguing with people constantly over fines, that was one of, I have to say, it was one of the worst parts of my job. I'm so happy it's gone. I can just have good quality happy conversations with people now that we would be talking about fines before. It's been amazing for our quality of life at work.

Brian Lehrer: Were you shocked that these cuts to the libraries were actually made? Like we were discussing a little before, library seemed to be a political football in the New York City budget dance. Every single year, "Oh, we don't have enough. We're going to have to make cuts to the library." Senior centers is another one that always comes up. By the end of the budget process at the end of June, because the fiscal year starts in July, the cuts to the senior centers and the libraries are generally restored and they find other ways to balance the budget.

I think there's a whole public relations thing going on there because these are such sympathetic and easily recognizable institutions that then the public reads a sigh of relief, and maybe other things that were cut fly a little below the radar. My point is that all this rhetoric happens, and then the cuts don't happen at the end of the day. This time, they actually happened. Was that shocking to you?

Lauren Comito: No, I wish it was. In the normal course of budget negotiations, the city council always really comes out for libraries and is really supportive of libraries because they, in their day-to-day work as city councilmen, people keep seeing what we do in the community and working with us to make our communities better, so they negotiate hard for us.

Mayor Adams seems to be doing this sort of loosey with the football budget strategy, where everybody got to be happy in June, but then there's this weird across-the-board flat cut that doesn't take needs into account in different areas. It doesn't make sense to me the budget for a city like New York City this way, that we would have this constant up and down and back and forth, where people can't do the necessary long-term planning for services, not just in libraries, but in all of the city agencies.

Brian Lehrer: I guess I'm wondering, because it was real this time, and the mayor hangs it so much on the recent arrival of 170,000 mostly asylum seekers who need city services of one kind or another if it makes you want to line up with him, and even with other politicians who were more anti-immigrant than Eric Adams is, or than most New Yorkers are and say, "President Biden, you got to close the border, you got to at least reduce the flow because look how it's coming out on the other end, Sunday library closures, and maybe if it continues, Saturday library closures." Do you get there?

Lauren Comito: No. [chuckles] Absolutely not. I think when you've done storytime with a kid who climbs up on your lap to poke at the book, who walked here from Venezuela, it makes it more real. These are people who fled, not having food or medicine for their children, they fled political persecution, and libraries are a place where everyone should be and is welcome, and our services are for everyone.

I think that there are other ways to manage a budget. I think we can invest in the care of both people who lived here before and people who have come from other countries, to build up the resources of everyone who lives here so that we can get ourselves out of this budget crisis. Obviously, Congress should be funding what's going on right now in New York City, they should be sending us funding to help support these services because we are taking the brunt of this right now. I'm grateful to the governor for doing that, but saying that they shouldn't come, that's not our values. That's not New York City values.

Brian Lehrer: This is WNYC-FM HD and AM in New York, WNJT-FM 88.1 Trenton, WNJP 88.5 Sussex, WNJY-FM 89.3 Netcong, and WNJO 90.3 Toms River, New York, and New Jersey values on display on New York and New Jersey Public Radio and live streaming at wnyc.org. Few more minutes with Lauren Comito, executive director of Urban Librarians Unite, and a longtime librarian. Alan in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hello, Alan.

Alan: Hi, Brian, a big fan of your program. My name is Dr. Alan Keller. I work at one of the public hospitals. I've been caring for asylum seekers and torture victims for the last 25 years. Lauren, I just want to thank you from the bottom of my heart. When I heard the segment start, I was like, "Uh-oh, here comes another vilification of the asylum seekers, why are they here," blah, blah, blah. First, I can tell you the reason they're here is because they had no choice but to flee. They didn't do these walks, as you know from Venezuela, because they felt they had no choice, but I just wanted to thank you.

I'm wondering, the pockets of the New York City philanthropic community are really deep, and I would wonder and hope whether this gap could be the kind of thing that they could step up to do. Then my second question is, where do I sign up to volunteer to read to some of the kids?

Brian Lehrer: Look at that. There's a doctor who's already providing medical care for some of the asylum seekers and he wants to volunteer to read for some of the kids too. How can he sign up or anybody else?

Lauren Comito: That's actually difficult. These populations are so vulnerable that you don't necessarily want everyone to be able to do this. It's no offense to the listener. I am sure he's doing fantastic work and he's clearly already working with asylum seekers. There's not really a way to do that. It's really important that the kids and families be kept safe and their privacy be protected.

For the first question, I'm always happy to see philanthropic investments in libraries, but libraries are a fundamental public good that we fund together to share resources. The priority really should be funding public goods, not necessarily taking funding away, and then expecting private donors to step in because private donors don't step in to fill gaps for organizations that have had a structurally significant amount of funding taken away. They want to see an organization that is standing on its own feet and then provide funding to augment programming. It's not super realistic to expect a number of philanthropic institutions to fund a $60 million budget gap.

Brian Lehrer: Also on the funding, and Alan, thanks for your call, listener responding to the soundbite of the mayor saying that maybe libraries could have found other efficiencies in state open on Sunday. Listener writes, "I understand librarians are not overpaid, but there is an entire other layer of program and development people in leadership who get paid very high salaries by nonprofit standards." Not saying that's enough to make up for the cuts, but isn't that what Adams is talking about?

Lauren Comito: It might be. He did bring up the endowment. Endowments are structurally limited in what you can pull from them. You can't pull from the principle of an endowment to fund programming. The trustees of that endowment have a responsibility to maintain it for the long term When it comes to jobs like this, I obviously don't make that much money. I don't really hold it against anybody who does, because when I talk to library directors, not just here, but in different parts of the country, the job is hard.

Brian Lehrer: The school library--

Lauren Comito: I don't want it

Brian Lehrer: School librarian texts, "Libraries of all kinds are the single most democratic space in our society. School libraries in urban, suburban, rural communities serve every teacher and child in their building. Every minute spent justifying our value to the powers holding purse strings means less time teaching, programming, serving our communities."

Let me ask you one last thing before you go. Do you, at the grassroots level, your group represents the librarians, have any problem with the leaders of the systems? I see when the announcement came out that there aren't going to be further cuts now to the libraries. The heads of the three public library systems, Brooklyn, Queens, and New York, covering the other three boroughs, put out a joint statement that said they, "Are grateful that Mayor Adams spared libraries from a January cut to our current operating budgets. We deeply appreciate the administration's recognition of the value of libraries and how much New Yorkers rely on them."

It surprised me a little bit that they would be, at this moment, with everything we've been talking about, thanking Eric Adams for recognizing the value of libraries. Is that why your group exists because you say some things that the presidents and their political positions can't?

Lauren Comito: It could be. We don't have problems with the presidents or the libraries or what they need to do in terms of maintaining services. Our standpoint will stay the same is that cuts to libraries from November are damaging to the fabric of our communities, and we will continue to speak out against them going forward.

Brian Lehrer: Lauren Comito, executive director of Urban Librarians Unite and a longtime librarian herself. Thank you for coming on with us at this important time for libraries.

Lauren Comito: Thank you so much for letting me talk about the work that we do. I really appreciate it.

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