Library budget cuts are the last thing Madison’s arts community needs

It’s time we stuck up for the Madison Public Library system.

Most weeks I make at least one visit to the Madison Public Library’s Lakeview branch, near my home on the north side. Sometimes I’m picking up a book. Sometimes I’m looking for a quiet spot to get some work done. It has taught me that the “quiet” part is massively overrated.

More often than not, the place is bustling with life. The kind of life I’d like to experience more often in my neighborhood. I like living in this area, but it’s certainly not the most dense or happening part of town. Not enough stuff within easy walking distance, lots of single-family homes and cars, and—outside of the Northside Farmers’ Market on Sundays—not enough chances to just mill around and bump into neighbors. 

Even though it’s in a strip mall, the Lakeview Library offers me a gap in this somewhat anti-social fabric. Adults, kids, people using the computers, people sitting quietly because they don’t have a lot of other places to go, friendly library staffers working the checkout counter and help desk, people chatting, people keeping to themselves. They come for all manner of other things—game clubs, writing assistance, cooking classes, art programming. And most importantly, a monthly event called “We Read To A Dog.” Does the dog have any idea what’s going on? Who cares?! I’ll defend this event with my life. On Saturdays from 11:50 a.m. to 12:10 p.m., The River Food Pantry’s lunch van pulls up in front to hand out free meals. Across MPL’s eight branches, you’ll also find movie screenings, free help filing your taxes, readings aimed at non-canine audiences, even a chance to mend your clothes. Maybe for some people it’s just a place you’re allowed to be without buying anything, or without having to be around alcohol. That is fine too.

I don’t want Madison’s libraries to quiet down even a little bit. As the City of Madison’s annual budget process heats up, moving toward a final Common Council vote in November, I hope community members will fight tooth and nail against proposed cuts to MPL’s funding and services. The City is grappling with an estimated $22 million budget gap. Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway has asked all City agencies to prepare for a five percent cut to their operating budgets for 2025. MPL has an operating budget of $20,757,477 for 2024, so that could mean up to $1.04 million in cuts. The library system’s staff and board are weighing their options for absorbing that loss, including losing evening and Sunday hours, laying off staff, and delaying a planned new library branch called the Imagination Center in Reindahl Park. There could also be cuts to programming such as the bookmobile-like Dream Bus, and to services including Kanopy, a free streaming service available to anyone with an MPL library card. 

We have a lot of good reasons to oppose cuts to MPL’s budget, staff, hours, and services. One is that MPL is one of the most effective support structures local government provides for the arts. MPL’s multi-faceted Bubbler program’s offerings span from artist residencies to resources for at-risk youth (as opposed to what we’re spending to incarcerate the at-risk youth). The library system has, since 2013, served as the Wisconsin Book Festival‘s parent organization. Those are just a couple of the most visible examples. We don’t know yet how or whether budget cuts would impact those programs. If that happened, the City would be walking back an already woefully inadequate commitment to the arts. 

The private Madison Public Library Foundation provides support for the Book Festival and other programming. The MPL Foundation’s 2023 Annual Report shows that the foundation raised about $2.9 million that year, spent about $1.9 million, and had an endowment balance of about $8.7 million. This is impressive, but the foundation isn’t set up to make up for even larger gaps in City funding. Any responsible person on the foundation’s staff or board would probably tell you that it wouldn’t be a viable long-term strategy.

We talk a lot about the fact that the state of Wisconsin does an abysmal job of providing arts funding—dead last in the country, by some measures. We’ve also got to talk more about the related fact that the City of Madison and Dane County also don’t do a great job with this. The numbers certainly don’t square with Madison’s lip service about the importance of the arts. One-time pandemic relief funding from the federal government really did make a meaningful difference for a time, but just threw our shortcomings into sharper relief.

I’ve been banging on ever so tediously about reporting on the City of Madison’s approach to arts funding for years now. Outside of MPL, City arts funding is largely a very awkward bedfellow of tourism funding, thanks to the drowsy proceedings of the City’s Room Tax Commission. The single biggest chunk of arts funding in the annual City budget goes to the Overture Center for the Arts, which over the years has presented a muddled narrative about what that money is actually for. City of Madison Arts Administrator Karin Wolf and the members of the Madison Arts Commission—like their counterparts at Dane Arts on the County side—do valiant work with what they’ve got, but don’t have much in the way of resources or power. The City doesn’t have a properly constituted arts office. Wolf works for the Planning Division. 

Against this backdrop, the Bubbler is a particularly bright spot. The Bubbler is part of MPL’s Community Engagement division, which has an operating budget of about $2.3 million for 2024. I don’t have a good breakdown of how much of that goes to the Bubbler specifically. Budget numbers aside, what stands out about the program is that it’s got some flexibility and agency to shape its programming. It also has a lot of ways to reach into different parts of the community, through neighborhood libraries and other points of contact. Its core staff members approach the arts scene with a mix of practical knowledge and profound enthusiasm, including Trent Miller, Carlee Latimer, Rebecca Millerjohn, and Rob Franklin (aka Rob Dz). These are the sorts of people you really, really want in these sorts of roles. 

Even if MPL did nothing but lend out books, it would deserve robust funding from the City of Madison. Public libraries have been expanding far beyond that core function for a long time. They pull together free access to a widely varied mix of resources in a way that nothing else in government or the market could replace. MPL has not only kept up with that evolution but has often shown the way. The federal Institute of Museum and Library Services awarded MPL one of its National Medals in 2016. MPL Librarians founded the now-defunct Library As Incubator Project, a website that from 2010 to 2017 documented public libraries’ growing role in the arts and other areas of programming. It’s one of the things the City of Madison’s government does best, and one of the hardest to be cynical about. We should be giving MPL more funding to expand its services, reach more people, and expand branch hours. 

Local governments already make it too difficult for most people to follow and meaningfully participate in the budgeting process. This time around, several new and volatile factors will make it even more confusing. City officials are weighing at least two approaches to a referendum on increasing property taxes—but we don’t know what will be on the ballot on November 5, and the ongoing tantrum among Madison’s affluent homeowners bodes ill for this kind of thing. (This is not to be confused with the Madison Metropolitan School District’s two property-tax referenda, which we do know will be on the ballot.) If a City funding referendum is on the ballot, then ideally we’ll know about it after the polls close on November 5. But—get this—the Common Council is scheduled to hold its final hearings on the budget starting on Nov. 12, keeping to an annual timeline that generally gets the budget to the Mayor and signed before Thanksgiving. So depending on all that, the public may have all of a week to understand which budget scenario we are actually dealing with before the Council votes on it. The City also recently announced that it outperformed its 2023 budget, but it’s not clear how much that will really help us in the 2025 budget cycle or beyond. Also, estimates of the budget gap and so forth change over time, as these things do, so we’re dealing with a moving target. 

The Wisconsin Legislature cramps Madison’s ability to raise tax revenue at the municipal level while providing very little direct state aid. A 2023 deal boosting state funding for local governments only helped so much. Seriously, guess how much additional funding the state gave to its second-largest city, which also happens to be its seat of government and part of the state’s fastest-growing county? For 2024, it was a total of $29 per person. The statewide average was $142 per person. The increase also came with strings attached, including a provision that bars the City from reducing police staffing levels.

We know that City departments will not share the burden of budget cuts equally. Five percent across the board is just a first position. The Madison Police Department has predictably thrown a fit about any proposed cuts to its operating budget, even when those cuts would simply represent MPD’s share of citywide cuts. Despite everything MPD and its political allies would have you believe, MPD’s annual adopted operating budget has continued to go up year over year. 

Consider what we get from the Madison Public Library for what we spend on it. It delivers so much more than silence, and deserves better than silence during this budget season.