By: Diane Benjamin
The below is from last years financial statements. It is reflected on two pages (197 and 198) making it impossible to read, so I retyped the info. Original link: http://www.cityblm.org/home/showdocument?id=12330
The financial statements were from 4/30/2016, so the 2016 data won’t be available for a LONG time.
Traffic at the library is down, but circulation is up and down. Is it books? music? videos? We don’t know, but obviously free works.
The Cultural District and Coliseum cost you many millions of dollars every year – including higher taxes to pay for the buildings.
How can the “people per event” numbers be justified? (I added them, of course they weren’t in the statements) The entire City of Bloomington has to pay entertainment expenses for a small number of people!
How is that fair?
If events without many attendees are making the stats look bad, why are they being held?
It must be government’s gift to the citizens who don’t know they are paying for it!
Now you do know, so what are you going to do about it?
Send connect transit busses out to the “rural & Urban areas” where the millennials live, and bus them into town, stop by the library, let them get a book and a CD for their IPOD and NEXT STOP the MARKARENA for a presentation on how WONDERFUL life in Bloomington is-ESPECIALLY with Green Top Grocery here, then bus them back. Do this 3 or 4 times a week! We’ll have Millenials, Better usage of the library, and better attendance @ the MARKARENA AND Green Top will have more business!
PROBLEM SOLVED
Heck, even Hales could have come up with THIS!
Send connect transit buses out to pasture,,,good idea!
If a library implies books, It’s hardly a library. It’s a free music / movie / video game / internet access / meeting place funded by taxpayers. I would think that book circulation would be on the constant decline.
Libraries should no longer charge us for overdue books, instead they should pay us for still going to the library. Stephen Colbert, March 14, 2017, Late Show