Council Member Thomas-Henry asks about capital funding lead times; library directors respond

Thank you, Chair.

I want to piggyback off one of your finance questions.

I can remember starting a couple of months ago and speaking to QL, Queens Public Library leadership, and we were talking about capital.

They had all these amazing capital projects to be funded and said,

This is what we need.

We're going to tell you now it won't start for seven years.

I only have an eight year term.

So my question to you all is, when you're trying to expand your collections, when you're trying to make improvements, how does, one, I know what the lead time for Queens is.

Is it the same lead time across the city?

And how do you plan for that, prepare for that, and how can we do better by you in the city to expedite the process?

Can you clarify, do you mean in terms of the collecting that we're doing or in terms of broader?

Capital funding.

Broader capital funding.

Broader capital funding.

I will say that one of the challenging parts of this job is that we are in the business of forever.

We are collecting this material and we are safeguarding it.

This is not our material, we're just holding it.

And so, as we were even mentioning before with all these climate concerns, it becomes really important to have good capital infrastructure, right?

And so,

A lot of that is very complicated, as you mentioned.

You know, you're looking at some money to fix a roof or something, and then you understand that that's going to take many years.

What do you do until then?

So I think that, to answer your question, yes, if the systems were a little bit less complicated and we could get these important capital upgrades

done faster, I think this would actually make all our collections safer.

It's the same process for us at BPL as well.

Of course, we try to expedite things as much as we can.

I think we also have the added challenge at CBH of being a landmark building with a landmark interior library, which, beautiful to look at, but, you know, it...

The building was built in 1881, and there's a lot more stuff.

So we really try to think creatively in terms of how we manage collection storage.

We do off-site storage.

We do try to limit the amount of time it takes to get materials to our researchers.

But of course, yeah, any funding to help that, of course, we'll all appreciate it.

You're looking at me, so I think I'm supposed to answer the question.

Because you have such a beautiful space here.

Yes, it is beautiful.

And we are about to embark on a facade project to replace all of the windows for this particular building.

And it has...

Taken many, many years to get to the point of starting.

And, you know, there's contractors, there's contracts, there are issues around, this is not the landmark building, but we do have a landmark building.

So I'm not sure, I think the funding is one thing, then there's the kind of machinations and process of actually

either city or state contracts.

So I'm not sure how to answer that question.

It has taken many years, really.

I think we are so grateful for the council's support, and I think the council knows that we have worked

for a while on the challenges around the process.

I think the challenges very much have to do with the process.

And I think as Roberta says, in the meantime, we are preserving, in the case of the law,

55 million collection items that we are on the hook for maintaining forever.

So I think we are really eager to work with you and support any ways to reform the complexities of the process.

We all get it.

We work at bureaucratic places as well, so we get it.

But this would...

Greatly help us be better and more responsible stewards to preserving these collections for future children, generations of the people that we are doing this for.

And in the meantime, we try to work around the capital process in any way that we can, which is not an ideal situation.

So we really look forward to more conversations on how we can refine that process.