Underfunding of libraries is going to start to show

I spoke with a friend the other day who didn’t know that Prospector, the unified catalog of over 30 million materials (books, movies, music) beyond Boulder Library’s own collections, was restored after having been cut in 2020. Many people had been upset when this service was canceled during the pandemic budget cuts that struck the library harder than any other city service (the library took 17% of all budget cuts in the city in 2020, despite representing only 3% of the city’s overall budget).

Now that Prospector is back, though, I hope people who really love that service and other services the Boulder Public Library provides understand that this feast and famine cycle of the city budget is the cause for these resources becoming unreliably available. It’s no way to treat a community resource as valuable as our award-winning library. Libraries are built and designed to be reliable, stable institutions and their funding should reflect that.

This is why I support the library district that will be on ballots this fall as measure 6C. The proposed 4% property tax increase is worth it so that we don’t have to wonder which services are cut, coming back, going away again or in danger of the chopping block, like Prospector. Library districts are a common form of governance in the state of Colorado, and I’m pleased to see the entire BVSD board in support, as well as state Sen. Steve Fenberg, state representatives Judy Amabile and Edie Hooton, and the Boulder County NAACP, to name a few.

Our libraries deserve attention this year because decades of underfunding are really going to start to show, and Boulder deserves great, adequately funded libraries.

— Michael Caplan, Boulder