NYC Libraries Would End Universal 6-Day Service Under Adams Budget Plan, Testimony Says

NEW YORK (New York Daily News/TNS) — The heads of New York City’s three public library systems warned on Tuesday that they’d have to close the book on universal six-day service at their branches and enact other “devastating” cuts to their social programs if Mayor Eric Adams’ latest budget plan is adopted.

In afternoon testimony before the City Council, the presidents of the New York, Brooklyn and Queens public library systems said Adams’ $109 billion budget bid for the 2025 fiscal year would force all of their branches to continue to stay closed Sundays — while most of them would also have to cut another day of service. That would mean those branches wouldn’t be able to stay open at least six days a week for the first time since 2015, when that schedule became the standard across the city.

“The impacts will be both devastating and unprecedented,” New York Public Library President Anthony Marx, whose system is the city’s largest in servicing Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island, said in prepared testimony. Marx added that the city’s libraries haven’t faced this big of a potential budget cut in over a decade.

All of the city’s more than 200 library branches have already operated without Sunday service since November, when a $22 million budget cut enacted by Adams forced them to end it. The cut was part of a string of agency budget trims Adams pushed through to offset city spending on the migrant crisis.

Adams’ 2025 fiscal year budget proposal would require another day of service to be curtailed because it contains $36.2 million in total additional spending shaves on top of continuing last year’s cut. That translates to a total funding drop of $58.3 million over pre-November levels, according to the library heads. The additional cuts wouldn’t slash baseline funding, but reduce discretionary spending buckets the library leaders said are typically renewed every year and which they have long pushed for making permanent.

Tuesday’s testimony comes as Council Democrats have argued many of the mayor’s enacted and proposed cuts are unnecessary and should be reversed before they have to adopt the 2025 fiscal year city budget by June 30. They’ve pointed to better-than-expected city tax revenue projections as a reason for reversing the cuts, a sentiment shared by the three library heads, who urged the mayor to undo the full $58.3 million cut so their systems can go back to offering seven-day service.

“Stop these games with people’s lives with their futures,” Marx said while lamenting that library budgets have for generations been the first on the chopping block in times of fiscal strain. “We’ve had enough.”

The mayor has consistently said he doesn’t want to subject city agencies to cuts, but that he’s being forced to in order to balance the budget after spending more than $4 billion to date on housing and services for tens of thousands of newly-arrived migrants.

On the flipside, the mayor’s office released updated tax revenue projections in January that forecasted a more positive fiscal picture than it had previously predicted. That rosier forecast prompted Adams to reverse some budget reductions, including for the NYPD and the Sanitation Department, and cancel other cuts he initially planned to subject the libraries and other agencies to in January and April.

Asked in his weekly press briefing Tuesday whether the library bosses’ testimony will prompt him to also roll back the remaining library cuts, Adams said he and the Council will “land the plane together.”

“We’re going to get through this, that’s the most I can say,” he said. “We’re going to do it with as least pain as possible, but we have to be fiscally responsible.”