Ephrata Agonistes

Last August this blog discussed the looming fiscal difficulties facing public libraries generally and Lancaster’s public library specifically. Over the past month, the crisis has arrived, however it hit not in the City, but in Ephrata.

Facing a shortfall projected between $80,000 to $100,000, the Ephrata Library – Lancaster County’s second busiest – was forced to make deep, painful cuts: Sundays and Fridays closed, evening hours curtailed, programs cancelled, and 11 employees – half the staff – laid off.  Gone.

On the face of it, the shortfall was attributed to a bad year of fundraising from private donors, who generate almost two-thirds of the Library’s operating funds.  (Perhaps given a ‘kickstart’ by its crisis, Ephrata Library out-performed other Lancaster County public library programs in the Thanksgiving week ‘Extraordinary Give’ fundraising drive, harvesting more than  $29,000 contributed by 328 donors.)

We’ve become accustomed as a nation to having a certain type of public service increasingly reliant on voluntary contributions rather than government support through the appropriation of general revenues.  This concept took off during the tax-cutting 1980’s, underpinned by the rhetorical premise that so-called “discretionary” services should be able to demonstrate their worth to the public by surviving in the competitive marketplace of charitable giving.

The poster-child that was said to validate the concept was public broadcasting – PBS, National Public Radio, and their member stations – which went from hand-wringing over lost government support to self-sustaining fundraising juggernauts in a few short years.  (At this point in the article, there is an overwhelming temptation to take a short break in order to meet this hour’s goal.  Is there a matching grant somewhere out there?)

But except for a few flagship institutions, public libraries, parks and museums are really not in the same fundraising boat as public TV or radio, given broadcasting technology’s incomparable reach and messaging impact.

For our more localized community institutions, the current over-dependence on private donors just is not going to cut it for the long-term.

Must it be this way?  Apparently not, as evidenced by Dauphin County, where a dedicated countywidelibrary tax funds 65 percent of library operations, providing the county’s libraries with funding stability, if not quite abundance.

Then there is the parlous condition of our fiscally mismanaged Commonwealth.  If a new Administration in Harrisburg can find a way to overcome the forecast of gridlock from a General Assembly controlled by the loyal opposition, perhaps some reasonable participation and overdue funding relief is in sight for our precious community public services.  

As Willy Loman’s wife Linda, warning of the awful price of abandonment, put it to her sons in Death of a Salesman, “Attention…attention finally must be paid.”