Long live La Farge: Find a way to save mid-city library
No, City Council (and particularly new Councilor Michael Harris), don’t try to “wean” the residents of mid-city Santa Fe from their library.
There’s talk of shutting down La Farge Branch Library, located on Llano Street virtually next door to prime book audiences at Santa Fe High School and De Vargas Middle School/Mandela International Magnet School, to help balance the city budget.
“I find myself using that library least of all,” Harris said at a recent council meeting. He said city government needs to “wean some of our users from that particular facility and redirect” them to other facilities.
Those other facilities would be the main library, about four miles away in the congested Plaza area, and the Southside Branch Library, about six miles away. Not so convenient for those SFPS students who now have a library a block away, and probably not convenient for many other Santa Feans who use La Farge, which gets about 234,000 visits a year to its centrally located site.
“Centrally located” is a key phrase here. The middle part of Santa Fe, located along and around thoroughfares like St. Michael’s Drive/Osage Avenue, Siringo Road and Camino Carlos Rey, sometimes seems likes a forgotten part of town — in between the affluent and historic east and north sides, and the newer, expanding south side — when it comes to city improvements and infrastructure investment.
A small example: When the city commissioned those cool artistdesigned bus stops a few years ago, they showed up downtown and on the south side, not along Siringo or St. Mike’s. Meanwhile, city workers began demolition of a bus stop in front of Santa Fe High, for some reason stopped the work and left a concrete jumble as an ugly ruin along Siringo for a ridiculous period of many months before finally completing the job.
Now, city leaders have raised the possibility of ripping out one of the area’s major public amenities.
There are complicating factors for La Farge. The school district owns the land where the library branch is located and the $1-a-year lease runs out next year. There are rumors the district might want to sell the site or take it back, although it’s hard to understand how a school board dedicated to education could justify action to shut down a library that is so perfectly located to serve students.
Also, the La Farge building is 40 years old and is said to need $2 million to $3 million in wiring and other improvements. But, remember, this would be a capital expenditure, not part of the operating budget said to be facing a big deficit. Despite the controversy over the use of a $30million parks bond approved by city voters in 2008, Santa Fe voters, based on history, would almost certainly approve library upgrades as part of a capital improvements package, if asked.
There’s also talk of having La Farge absorbed into existing facilities at the nearby Santa Fe University of Art and Design. That’s not a bad idea but, with guarded entrance gates to boost campus security, SFUAD may not be seen as openly accessible by immigrants or others.
It should be pointed out that, as library hours have become a focus of budget-cutting talks, the city administration came up with $300,000 in “unbudgeted excess land use permit fees” to support a project near and dear to Mayor Javier Gonzales — his proposed Verde Fund to fight global warming and poverty.
First, we note here that, given this development, the projected $15 million deficit surely now should be downgraded to $14.7 million on all city documents. And it makes one wonder if there aren’t other dollars lying around that could be used to support libraries if the right people wanted to find them.
As we’ve noted before, there are a couple of obvious ways to scrape together more dollars in the police department — by cutting back the expense of paying for fuel and wear and tear on patrol cars that officers get to use on commutes from homes in Rio Rancho or other not-so-near domiciles, and the additional overtime costs that city records show were racked up by the return under Gonzales to four-day, 10-hour-perday workweeks for officers. But these unnecessary costs apparently are a sacred cow that shall not be touched by the hands of city leaders.
In any case, the council and the school board should cooperate and find a way to keep La Farge going strong.