Excellent news. The $180 million downtown library is on hold!  This is very good news indeed when this new project already has a price tag comparable to the entire Lansdowne project, and it’s another expensive plan on which voters were not consulted.

Before someone starts suggesting I’m a Philistine (apparently, I am too late for that).  I want to state that I am big proponent of libraries. I like books, I’m a voracious reader, and I appreciate the various services that libraries offer. However, I strongly believe that libraries should be built where people live. Not downtown where parking is expensive and hard to find, or where your only other choice is to plan the better part of your day around the OC Transpo weekend schedule.

Libraries are good; however, my argument remains that a monolithic downtown library is not in our best interest.

In my support for small, neighbourhood libraries, I have emphasized the need for volunteer assistance along with reasonably paid staff.  The Ottawa Sunshine list tells us that there are over one dozen librarians/managers in this city who make over $100,000 each, for a total of $1.5 million a year.  The top librarian, who makes over $172,000 a year, wants the city to spend as much on a new library as private developers have spent on building Scotiabank Place.

So, to those who try to turn this debate into “GJ vs the Ottawa Public Library” (as if a mega-library is the only thing that defines the OPL), I challenge you to also say that we need more of these highly-paid elites offering services to the underprivileged. Will you also stand up and say that these massive costs are justified to create a quiet place downtown to study or do research on the internet?

I understand that the average employee you meet in the library is paid somewhere between $44,000 and $54,000 a year. Others on the library payroll receive anywhere between $24,000 for a page to $35,000 for actual library staff, as well as $55,000 – $66,000 for a librarian and up to $70,500 for coordinators (moving up to $73,800 next year) in 38 different job classifications (see appendix E).  However, these salary ranges do not take into account non-unionized library managers, making anywhere from $70,000 to $100,000 (and as noted above, includes at least 14 managers making over $100,000 every year). As tempting as it may be, I don’t want to turn this into an investigation about how many layers of management you need to run a library.

The estimated cost of $180 million (or $200 million, since we know how well the City of Ottawa estimate project costs; which is more likely to balloon to $500 million by the time it’s built) for a downtown library is only for the infrastructure.  I have yet to see any estimates on how much it would cost the city to run this mega-library year after year.  Hundreds of thousands in upkeep, maintenance, heating/cooling, millions to buy new materials to fill its larger shelves, and several millions to staff?  The city would be best placed to reveal some of this information.

Good value for money?  You be the judge on election day.  I can assure you that both before and after election, I will remain opposed to this massive waste of money, and in favour of neighbourhood libraries or local library functions combined with community centres, which is another discussion worth pursuing, with internet access and study rooms, staffed by a small small number of properly paid employees and supported by volunteers from the community (giving ESL lessons, reading to children, teaching how to use computers). And preferably, at the end of the day, all of them would live in the same neighbourhood.

For now, I am thrilled that the initial $26 million to acquire the site will not be spent.

–GJ–