Every Library in Long Beach Would Be Closed on Mondays

The budget calls it going from six days a week to five at five branches. Those five branches are the only Long Beach libraries open on a Monday. Closing them costs $1,275,575 to save — three years after the city paid $1.25 million to open them.

On an average Monday, more than a thousand people walk into a Long Beach public library — a count library staff gave the Long Beach Post and LAist this month. Under the budget the city proposed on July 30, next year they would find every branch shut.

That is not how the budget says it. The city's own summary describes the change as going from six days a week to five at five branches — Bay Shore, Burnett, El Dorado, Harte and Michelle Obama, named in Attachment B of the FY 27 Proposed Budget Book. Every word of that is accurate. It is also the entire Monday.

We checked all twelve Long Beach Public Library locations against the library's own posted hours on August 10. Those five branches are the only ones open on Mondays, noon to 7 p.m. The other seven — Alamitos, Bach, Brewitt, Dana, Los Altos, Mark Twain and the Billie Jean King Main Library — are already closed that day. Remove Monday from the five, and the number of Long Beach libraries a person can walk into on a Monday is zero.

As quoted / in context

As quoted. The city's Community Budget Summary puts it this way: reverse the enhanced library hours "from six to five days a week by removing Monday hours at five branches," with 11 full-time-equivalent positions in clerks and assistants, "preserving library access across the City for the remaining 5 days." Attachment B uses nearly the same construction — the reduction "allows the Department to preserve core services at all library locations."

In context. Both sentences are accurate about a branch and silent about the city. Five locations is not a portion of Long Beach's Monday service. It is Long Beach's Monday service.

That is the claim the Long Beach Public Library Foundation is making in a petition, and which Kristen Hernandez of the Foundation put to the Long Beach Post as a possibility — "a 2027 where there are no libraries open on Monday." It is not a forecast. It is the posted schedule minus the line item.

What closing Monday saves

Attachment B books the Monday reduction at $1,275,575 and 11.00 FTE. Inside that figure: five library clerks, four library assistants, a vacant general librarian in Education and Outreach Services at the Billie Jean King Main Library, 1.0 FTE of page hours, the overtime budget for Monday hours, and a reduced budget for security services.

The department's full net structural change for the year is $1,434,072 and 12.00 FTE, per Table 3 of the budget book's executive summary. Put that beside the hole the budget was written to fill — a $58.2 million General Fund shortfall — and the Monday line is 2.2 percent of it. The library department's whole contribution is 2.5 percent.

Measured against everything Long Beach plans to spend from its General Fund next year — $738,554,895, a figure the city's own table footnotes as excluding all-years carryover — the library's reduction is 0.19 percent. About one dollar in every five hundred.

Two documents count the same cut two ways, which is worth knowing before anyone quotes either. The Community Budget Summary's department table lists Library, Arts & Culture at 14 positions — three vacant, 11 filled. Table 3 lists 12.00 FTE. Both are correct; page hours and half-time roles do not arrive in whole people. Citywide the proposal eliminates 483 positions, 220 of them vacant. Fourteen of 483 is 2.9 percent.

The city bought this day three years ago

Monday service is three years old almost to the week. It began Monday, Aug. 28, 2023, at Alamitos, Harte and Michelle Obama, with Burnett and El Dorado "anticipated to begin Monday operations in late September," according to the library's own announcement. The city funded it with $1.25 million in structural and one-time enhancements in the adopted Fiscal Year 2023 budget and called it the most significant expansion of library services since 2007.

Cost to add the sixth day: $1.25 million. Cost to remove it: $1,275,575.

The 2023 announcement also explains why today's list of five branches is not the same list of five branches. Alamitos got six-day service only while Bay Shore was closed for renovation, and the release said so in a footnote — six days would move to Bay Shore when it reopened, and Alamitos would go back to five. The hours page says it did.

One more thing the documents disagree about: the Community Budget Summary describes the hours as "adopted as a part of the FY 24 Budget," while Attachment B, in the same PDF set, says they "first started in Fiscal Year 2023." The library's press release settles the calendar — the first Monday was Aug. 28, 2023, inside a fiscal year that ended Sept. 30.

Checking the Foundation's 6 percent

The Foundation's petition says the proposed budget "threatens to cut roughly 6% of the library department's funding." We ran it. The department's proposed FY 27 General Fund total is $20,406,499; add the $1,434,072 back and the pre-reduction base is $21,840,571. The cut is 6.6 percent of that base and 7.0 percent of what would remain. Roughly 6 percent holds up, and if anything it rounds down.

Against the departments that survive the same budget: Library, Arts and Culture is 2.8 percent of General Fund spending. Police and Fire together are $472.2 million of it — 63.9 percent. Both of those departments are also reduced, Police by $20,907,917 and 68.47 FTE, Fire by $14,097,699 and 32.70. This is not an argument about who was cut more. It is an accounting of what a library's 2.5 percent is 2.5 percent of.

The Mayor's FY 27 recommendations, which restore or add 70 positions citywide, add "$50,000 in the General Fund Group in the Library, Arts and Culture Department to support library programming and materials budget." That is 3.5 percent of the department's proposed reduction. The materials cut it partly answers is $5,875.

What one Monday costs

We ran the Monday line against a calendar, with the assumptions stated. Five branches across 52 Mondays is 260 branch-days; $1,275,575 divided by 260 is $4,906 a branch-day. That is a floor, not a figure — the library closes for holidays, several of which fall on Mondays, so the real divisor is smaller and the real cost per open Monday is higher.

Run the thousand-plus Monday visitors from the top of this piece across the same 52 Mondays — about 52,000 visits — and the line works out to roughly $24.53 a visit. Another floor, and a count library staff gave those two outlets rather than one the city publishes. The same reporting puts the whole system at more than 2,800 patrons a day across twelve branches, with visits up 8 percent over the past year and programming up 50 percent. Demand is going up; the schedule is coming down.

What it excludes

Money that isn't the General Fund. The $20,406,499 is the department's General Fund line. Measure US and grant money sit outside it, and Attachment B moves in both directions across that boundary in the same year: a 0.50 FTE community program specialist is shifted onto grant funding, and a 0.50 FTE public health associate is eliminated because the structural Measure US money isn't there. A percentage of the General Fund line is not a percentage of the library's budget.

The cuts that aren't Monday. Beyond the hours line, Attachment B eliminates a general maintenance assistant and trims landscaping at the Main Library ($184,416 and 1.00 FTE), cuts the materials budget ($5,875), and eliminates the 0.50 FTE public health associate who handled mental health programming and services for 13-to-18-year-olds ($70,318). It adds $25,000 to a contract with a social service provider working with at-risk youth.

Arts and culture. The department in every table above is Library, Arts and Culture. Its General Fund total is not a library budget, and no percentage taken against it is purely a library percentage.

The council. Everything here is a proposal — the City Manager's, plus the Mayor's recommendations. The first budget hearing was Aug. 4. The fiscal year starts Oct. 1, which is the deadline the council is working against.

How to say something about it

The city's digital comment card is open through Friday, Aug. 14, at 5 p.m., and two of the five community budget meetings remain as of this writing: Monday, Aug. 10, at Renaissance High School for the Arts, and Thursday, Aug. 13, at Long Beach City College's Liberal Arts Campus, both 6 to 7:30 p.m. Spanish, Khmer, Tagalog and ASL interpretation are offered at all of them.

The city's notice adds that residents without a computer or smartphone can complete the comment card at a Long Beach Public Library location during regular business hours.

Divide responsibly.