Governor’s budget unkind to Connecticut’s library readers

Since 1976, people who use Connecticut’s public libraries have been able to get a book from any library in the state by using what is known as the Connecticard.

The Connecticard is actually your own library card, and it’s all you need to have your library get you a book it doesn’t have from any other library. It not only makes hundreds of thousands of additional books readily available to the state’s readers, but literally makes all libraries equal, from the poorest towns to the wealthiest, at least in the all important area of having books for their readers. 

But the 39-year-old Connecticard might not make it to 40. The governor’s budget calls for its elimination, to save all of $1 million. It’s the governor’s way of sending the message that we all have to make sacrifices — even those who borrow the books they read.

Last year, people borrowed 4.5 million books and other media items from each other’s libraries in addition to those millions they borrowed from their own. James Benn, a trustee of the Lyme Library, told a rally at the Capitol a couple of weeks ago that if the libraries had to buy these books on their own, the cost would have been $68 million. 

This puny and petulant cut is truly a threat to a marvelous program that costs pennies, yet I couldn’t find a daily newspaper that covered the rally of angry readers, only the online Connecticut News Junkie. Maybe this is to be expected when our reading is more and more confined to 140 characters.

It’s also something I take personally. I still remember how excited I was when, as an 8- or 9-year-old, I discovered I could get a card that let me take a book home and read it. It was a book about Napoleon’s childhood on the island of Corsica, and it’s no coincidence that a decade later, I majored in history.

My job in college was in the periodical department of the library where I earned $20 a month and read every issue of Life Magazine from its first issue in 1936 to the spring of 1955, and every cartoon in The New Yorker from its founding in 1925 and learned a lot of the kind of history you don’t forget.

The Malloy budget not only hurts your library and its ability to provide you any book you want to read by dumping the Connecticard, it also takes around $300,000 from the operation of a consortium that enables libraries to buy their books and other supplies at a volume savings. 

This move actually makes you wonder about the wisdom of Malloy’s money people, because the consortium costs each of us about 10 cents a year and yields $7.1 million in savings. The Colchester librarian told the rally the consortium saved her small library $12,000 last year; the larger West Hartford Library saved $129,000. 

And what does the Malloy administration have to say about this fiscal book burning it’s advocating? Funny I should ask, because it was just about a year ago that Malloy and the Legislature were praising themselves for forming a similar consortium to make e-books, the kind you can download electronically, available to libraries at a reduced cost. 

This innovative program is, of course, nothing more than an electronic version of the book consortium they’re now about to abolish. “Kids aren’t going for books anymore,” said one profound legislative thinker in celebrating the e-book legislation. 

The major selling point to legislators for the e-book consortium was “Connecticut’s distinguished history of interlibrary exchange.” You may see some irony here. As is the custom in state government, after the initial fanfare, the $2.2 million to fund the program wasn’t passed until recently and has yet to have any impact on the libraries. 

Last Friday, a Republican budget proposal eliminates the Connecticard cut and most other library cuts which might embarrass the Democrats enough into doing the same.

But a spokesman for Governor Malloy has defended eliminating funding for the Connecticard by calling it one more example of the state’s building “a brighter Connecticut for tomorrow by making tough decisions today.” It may be the first time in history an attack on reading books has been linked with building a brighter anything. 

Simsbury resident Dick Ahles is a retired journalist. Email him at dahles@hotmail.com.