Gwinnett libraries feel budget crunch

By Mark Davis

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

This has been a love affair for Karen Harris, but now, things just can’t be the same.

They won’t spend as much time together. Weekends won’t be as fun anymore.

These things happen. When you manage one of Gwinnett County’s busiest libraries, and its hours are cut, you have to accept reality.

“I’ve been a professional librarian for 36 years,” Harris, director of the system’s Norcross branch, said this past week. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

Effective Sunday, for the first time in eight years, all of Gwinnett’s 14 libraries will be closed on Sundays. They’ll also be closed on Mondays, traditionally a big day for after-school visits. Daily hours the rest of the week also have been trimmed.

Gwinnett commissioners last month voted to curtail hours throughout the system to help balance a budget crippled by failing banks, foreclosed homes and faltering tax revenues. For a county like Gwinnett, whose fortunes have been built on an expanding economy, the crunch has forced unprecedented, and tough, decisions.

Commissioners cut the county budget by more than $20 million, hitting hard at police staffing, capital improvements and department expenditures. The $7 million Hamilton Mill library, still under construction, won’t be staffed when it is complete.

The misery may not be over, Commission Chairman Charles Bannister warned. “We will continue to examine our 2009 and future budgets to see where we can make more cuts.”

For Ken Jones, 49, a veteran and unemployed diesel mechanic, the cutbacks and closings are a big deal. He’s been visiting the Norcross branch on Buford Highway since it opened nearly two decades ago. Jones is angry about the cuts — and not just for himself.

“Education,” he said. “That’s the No. 1 priority. Without education, you got no future.”

And without libraries, said Jones, “you got no education.”

A busy, cool haven

This is a bustling place, even on afternoons when Norcross blinks sleepily in summer’s heat. Opened in 1990, the branch comprises 10,000 square feet of desks, shelving and 50,000 books. As technology has changed, so has the library: Its 19 computers are in such demand that users are limited to 30 minutes. They are almost always in use, by job seekers mostly, polishing their resumes and scouting potential employers.

Alex Pulido is one. He’s been coming here daily since his employer, a compressor manufacturer in Stone Mountain, closed for a few months in the worsening economy. He can return to his job when the outlook improves, but his heart lies elsewhere. He’s a chef.

“I read cookbooks, mostly,” said Pulido, 29.

A native of San Diego, Pulido spent time in Mexico, where his family originated. There, working with his grandmother, he developed a love of the culinary arts. He was in his chosen profession until a year-and-a-half ago, when the Buckhead restaurant where he worked closed. He and his wife moved to Norcross, where Pulido discovered this cool haven.

He gestured at the hushed room. Two boys bent toward computer screens. A teen girl held a cellphone while she scanned titles.

“Without this,” Pulido said, “they’ll be out on the streets.”

A statewide crunch

Georgia has 61 public library systems, most regional. In the metro area, the systems are usually defined by county lines — Clayton, Cobb, DeKalb and Forsyth, for example. Atlanta-Fulton County rounds out nearby systems.

Gwinnett circulates more books than any of the systems in the state. Last year, according to the Georgia Public Library System, it checked out 7.1 million volumes. In the metro area, only Cobb got even remotely close to that sum — slightly more than 4 million books circulated.

Such numbers are hard to ignore. In 2000, the trade publication Library Journal awarded Gwinnett its Library of the Year award.

Those were heady times, said Harris. “Imagine middle-aged librarians, jumping up and down” when the award was announced.

The present is a different story, said Nancy Stanbery-Kellam, the Gwinnett system’s executive director. “My fear is that [cutbacks] will create situations where people cannot get to the library,” she said. “The idea of keeping someone from our services is most distasteful. We’re librarians.”

The situation is no better elsewhere in Georgia, said State Librarian Lamar Veatch, whose department oversees Georgia’s public libraries.

The department this year has about $30 million to disburse to the systems, which operate on local and state funds. In the past six months, on budget-balancing orders from Gov. Sonny Perdue, it has steadily whittled at a per-capita payment formula that allocates money for buying books. Rural systems, which traditionally rely more on state money, are especially hurt, he said.

“They’re facing a double-whammy,” he said.

A library professional since 1973, Veatch said he has never seen times when libraries were more pinched, or more in demand.

‘The people’s university’

Norcross, with a population growing ever more diverse, may be a harbinger for the rest of Gwinnett. Latest U.S. Census figures show that nearly one-quarter of the county’s population is foreign-born, and its minority population hovers at 50 percent. In 1990, Gwinnett was overwhelmingly white.

Three years ago, the Norcross library, along with branches in Buford and Sugar Hill, became one of three in Gwinnett that began offering Spanish-English programs to cater to its changing clientele. It offers traditional fare, such as story times for youngsters and families, but takes that several steps further. “People & Stories/Gente y Cuentos,” for example, is a tutorial designed to ease Spanish speakers into using English.

The branch apparently is serving a need. In July, more than 23,000 people passed through its electronic turnstiles — a 16 percent increase over July 2008. Harris credits some of that increase to a bad economy: Folks are out of work and looking for cheap diversions.

In Norcross, the customers run the gamut: daily visitors like Jones and Pulido, weekends-only customers and the “once-every-three-week” types who check out stacks of books at once. All, said Harris, are attending a school with no tuition, no social distinctions.

“Libraries are the people’s university,” she said.

If libraries are universities, their student bodies vary. The branches at Collins Hill and Suwanee, for example, generally cater to a better-educated, more affluent crowd that is higher up the social ladder. Norcross has more customers whose feet are placed, unsteadily, on the lower rungs.

“At this branch,” she said, “you just might be trying to make it.”