Hold request declined

Council member’s budget attack misplaced

As a member of the Springdale City Council, Amelia Williams had every right to raise questions about Mayor Doug Sprouse’s 2021 budget proposal. Indeed, one could argue City Council members have a responsibility to do just that.

Budgets are spending plans. They’re a road map for how a government entity will wisely spend, or wastefully blow, all those tax dollars sent its way for the benefit of public services and projects. In Springdale, the 2021 budget presented by Sprouse totaled $56.5 million.

City Councils get to approve a budget once a year. It’s typically near the end of the preceding year. And that’s why November and December often produce discussions about why money is being allocated for this or that. Those discussions can sometimes be intense (see Washington County Quorum Court, circa every year).

Williams, one of the eight members of the City Council, decided this year to challenge Sprouse’s $2.4 million budget for the Springdale Public Library, a number barely different from what was budgeted for 2020. Her basic argument? The library ought to be open for business as usual. Never mind the pandemic. “If the schools are open, then the library should be open,” Williams told Sprouse and the City Council in early December.

Fair enough. It’s a policy matter and reasonable people can disagree.

We would, however, note that equating open schools with an open library overlooks some differences. Schools are, or certainly have become this year, a very controlled environment. Even a parent of a student can’t just waltz in to have lunch with his or her child during the pandemic. While schools are open, they are effectively on lockdown from external visits. School administrators know who is in the building at all times and have authority to directly intervene if students or teachers fail to follow pandemic protocols designed to protect everyone.

A fully open library certainly has less control. It is, after all, a public library, which means it’s there for anyone who wants to show up. That’s what makes it a great asset to the community, but in the pandemic, it can also make it a place of potential danger — for staff and for patrons.

It’s also important to note that the library isn’t closed. It is, rather, operating differently than normal. According to Librarian Marcia Ransom, the library is staffed from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Saturday. Patrons can schedule 45-minute visits at allotted times each day, with a limit of up to six households (around 50 people) in each time slot.

Curbside pickup of library resources is also available. And those resources don’t just walk themselves off the shelves and out to library patrons waiting in their cars. Nor has the programming for young people and families stopped, although it has changed during the pandemic to provide high levels of safety.

In November, library staff answered 4,000 calls for assistance, Ransom reported. That hardly sounds like a closed library.

Mayor Sprouse has said he defers to department heads to evaluate the best way to operate based on their experience and guidelines from the Arkansas Department of Health and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Our problem with Williams’ approach isn’t that, if she were mayor, she would approach the library’s status differently. She’s certainly welcome to that opinion of how things should be done.

But she’s gone further, attacking the library’s 2021 budget and urging her fellow City Council members to cut next year’s funding if the library would not accede to her demands to reopen in a more normal way of doing business, which she defined as at least 60% capacity.

The reality is the public faces pandemic-related restrictions on “normal” activities everywhere they turn. It shouldn’t be viewed as unusual for a library to modify its approach. The library has left several open positions unfilled, which is a responsible move, but will need the help when they can resume normal operations.

When will that be? As with so much else, it’s hard to say. It depends on how well Springdale and the rest of Northwest Arkansas control the spread of covid-19 and, ultimately, on when vaccines are available enough to make the virus much less of a public health threat.

Last week, the rest of the City Council apparently dismissed Williams weeks-long effort to punish the library for its responsible operation in the midst of a pandemic. None of her fellow City Council members offered the required second for her motion to amend the budget.

Williams failed to convince anyone. It’s not that we blame her for expressing her concerns. That’s her job as a member of the City Council. But the headline-making, seemingly vindictive budget-cutting she proposed got the level of support it deserved.