Lately I’ve read a number of letters-to-the-editor lauding the supposedly real true authentic genuine valid accurate not-kidding-this-time beginning of the long-promised renovation of the Great Neck library’s main branch.
Long-promised, that is, in over 15 years of marathon meetings, environmental-impact studies, multiple consultants with their hefty fees, and ongoing contentious disagreements that make childhood spats look like high-level diplomacy.
So incomprehensible is this quicksand project to me that I researched the people responsible for its glacial sluggishness and colossal incompetence.
It turns out that over the past decade and a half, the library’s Boards of Trustees have been comprised of teachers, business leaders, college professors, a school principal, a CPA, several lawyers of various specialties, a library director, and a comptroller, et al, people who earned multiple bachelor, masters’ and doctoral degrees from prestigious schools like Queens College, UMass, Columbia, Hofstra, Brandeis, Adelphi, on and on.
It is as if these stewards of our library system were determined to prove the point that higher education, earnest promises and good intentions were a magic formula for staggering ineptitude.
How else to explain that between 1995 and 2011, they hired four different architectural firms for a grand total of taxpayer money amounting to almost a million dollars -$ 849,350 to be exact. But after each firm presented detailed renovation plans based on countless meetings with the above-mentioned boards, not one decision, one enhancement, or one improvement was made!
This is equivalent to sophisticated Great Neck residents consciously choosing to put their faith in the judgment of doctors and lawyers who had 15 years worth of malpractice suits!
Incredibly the library now has the gigantic chutzpah to ask recession-stressed Great Neck taxpayers for a whopping $8,416,000 – the eight as in million – an increase over the 2011 budget.
And it gets worse: 75 percent of that $8 million is for the salaries and benefits of employees, another 15 percent for operations and indulgences like “membership travel dues” – but a measly 9.8 percent for books, materials and programs. Am I the only person who smells a rat?
Clearly the current board is as incapable as past boards in actually accomplishing a fiscally sane renovation of the library’s main branch. That they have suggested the preposterously exorbitant “starting” price of $22.5 million once again demonstrates not only their utter lack of qualifications, but their snooty attitude toward a public that has lobbied vigorously for a smaller project which would renovate the more-than-ample 47,000-square-feet of library space to create a beautiful, multi-function, modern building that Great Neck can afford.
Great Neck residents can stem the tide of this madness by voting against the library budget on May 17, the better to send a resounding message to the current board that they are no longer free to abuse our trust and waste our money.
And while they’re at it, they can vote down the obscene $193-million education budget – not counting the dozens of privately-paid-for pricey tutors – that “educates” a mere 6,000 children.
Wake up, Great Neck!
Joan Swirsky
Great Neck
