Sunday Library Hours Likely Head Toward Restoration as Council Mulls 2025 Budget
The Mayor and the City Council appear to be inching toward restoring the cuts to libraries that forced all branches to shut down on Sundays. The City Council is said to be anxious to restore the funds in the next budget.
The City Council finance committee appears ready to restore the $58 million in cuts that Mayor Eric Adams enacted last November as he scrambled to erase what he said was a looming $7 billion city budget deficit, sources tell Straus News.
While some cuts to the NYPD and FDNY have already been restored after public outcry, the cuts to the city’s three library systems in New York (Manhattan and Staten Island) Brooklyn and Queens, which resulted in all city library branches closing on Sundays, were not restored.
The City Council appears ready to put it back into the next budget.
“The City Council is fully committed to restoring funding to our libraries and bringing back much-needed services that should’ve never been cut,” Keith Powers, a finance committee member who represents Stuyvesant Town and the Upper East Side told Straus News after the finance committee wrapped up its hearings on May 22.
The Adams administration has not fully endorsed restoring the cuts but appears to be leaning that way. At the May 2q press availability, Adams tossed the library question to deputy mayor Maria Torres-Springer who heads Housing, Economic Development and Workforce.
“This administration has been 100 percent committed to libraries,” said Torres-Springer. And despite the $58 million cut last year, she insisted libraries “have been protected from many rounds of cuts...Of course, we’re going to continue to work with the City Council through the adopted budget to make sure we build on those successes and get to the right place to continue to support libraries.
“It’s an ongoing conversation,” she added. “We want to make sure we we’re doing the right thing, both in terms of fiscal stewardship and supporting our amazing libraries.”