Guest Post: Hal Schrieve on the Fight to Fund NYC Libraries
The Seven Stories author and librarian makes the case for prioritizing library funding
My name is Hal Schrieve, and I’m a Seven Stories author and librarian. In addition to writing Young Adult fiction about queer teens, monsters, aliens, and evil cops, I have 8 years of experience working with books and the public. From 2017-2019, I worked doing library service at Rikers Island and bookmobile outreach at Queens Library. I was hired by NYPL as a children’s librarian in 2019. I stepped into a world of libraries dealing with consistent attacks on our institutional legitimacy. From book censorship fights in red states that have resulted in complete defunding of some local libraries[1] to COVID closures that left service interrupted and forced a quick pivot to virtual programs and outdoor outreach,[2] these have not been quiet years for libraries. In addition to being a political flashpoint, many public libraries’ budgets are, each year, up for debate, including in NYC. The biggest NYC library cuts occurred during The Great Recession in 2011, when a whopping 27% of the library’s budget across three systems was hacked away, leading to many branch closures and to staff shortages that lowered the level of services possible for the next decade. Cuts are back this year, which is why I am writing this post.
Despite Urban Librarians Unite, the unions, and the library system presidents testifying for the City Council each budget cycle about the need for library funding, a huge portion of each year’s library funding is always a bit of a question mark. Mostly, the library’s board and admin assume that funding will remain more or less stable — after all, libraries are vastly popular and are extremely useful at building social trust, as well as supplementing public education. But you can’t depend on precedent. In 2024, Eric Adams’ proposed budget cut $58 million from NYC libraries[3] — which, at the time, amounted to something like 15% of the library budget. His claim at the time was that migrants were using up so much city funding that there was nothing left for everyone else. Meanwhile, the police got big robots that did nothing.[4]
Last year, Mayor Zohran Mamdani made history by running a campaign that made big promises unapologetically, spoke in hard numbers, and responded to the concerns of working people, children, renters, parents, teachers, immigrants, and the homeless. I was a part of that campaign, but this didn’t make me special. Mamdani’s campaign, with its big commitments around childcare and housing, combined with a willingness to tax the richest New Yorkers to make a more functional city, enjoyed a practically unprecedented groundswell of support from grassroots canvassers. This should tell you about the direction of our political future. It was a beautiful thing. A million doors knocked takes a lot of people. My own contributions took the form of emphasizing, at about 1200 individual doors and on phone calls and zoom calls with people from my union, that Mamdani was going to fund the libraries. This wasn’t just an assumption on my part. Early in his campaign, Zohran promised city workers at union-specific town halls that he would commit to giving a baseline 1% of the budget to parks and 0.5% to libraries. These were percentages that city workers asked for specifically based on the experience of constant scarcity and precarity with previous budgets. A 0.1% increase in library funding means millions of dollars for full staffing, roof repairs, more storytimes, more tutoring, and more programs that help New Yorkers utilize our printers, computers, archives and databases. Other candidates also signed on to these pledges; when they dropped out, Mamdani kept mentioning those numbers. He last mentioned them in December: “We will not be doing a dance around something that we believe is critical to New Yorkers,” Mamdani said. “If there’s something we think is important, we will make that clear in our own preliminary.”[5] I was really looking forward to the release of this budget. I didn’t vote for the dimples or charisma — I voted for a functional city. And a lot of other people did, too.
But Mamdani’s initial budget, released February 17, doesn’t keep his promise. Instead, it allocates $456 million to all three library systems — which sounds like a lot, but is just about 0.39% of the $127 billion budget, and in real dollars, over $20 million less than either the preliminary or the adopted budget of FY26.[6] He’s speaking now in the language of deficits, though the precise amount of this deficit keeps changing, as it did under Adams’ austerity pleas. Obviously, he needs Hochul and the state to implement the broad income tax; equally obviously, unfunded state mandates require wrangling with more deficits.[7] However, there are plenty of other sources of revenue besides our civic institutions. The police are still working with over $6 billion each year; my guess is that some of that funding is still going to the SRG that Mamdani committed to disband,[8] or to large cars that will then be parked on sidewalks.[9]
After the budget was restored under Adams after the push-pull,[10] ULU, the DSA, abolitionist Mariame Kaba, and a huge number of patrons, librarians and library-lovers got together to try to figure out a plan to get politicians on board with establishing baseline library funding as a percentage of the city budget, so that large chunks of our operating budget could not be sporadically yanked away on the whim of an individual administration. The result was NYC PLAN, or NYC Public Library Action Network. They (we) were part of the pressure on the mayoral campaigns from the start. Now, they’re asking that people write to Mayor Mamdani to ask him to give libraries what he promised — a consistent percentage of the budget. They also have a convenient script to use to call your council member. I would invite you to do this, and also to attend a rally for libraries on March 21st.
During the budget season, seasoned policy wonks usually tell everyone to calm down— the money will be negotiated back after it’s been held over our heads for a while. However, as someone working at NYPL during the Adams budget tug-of-war, a massive proposed cut has real consequences. All libraries that had been open on Sunday closed for several months, hiring was frozen and planned repairs in Harlem were delayed, resulting in longer library closures. Other things, like expansions to after school tutoring, new computers, and about a third of new book acquisitions, were put on hold. All of these interruptions affect actual library use. You see it in the library when they stop buying new books; patrons noticed too when fewer copies of new bestsellers were available. We were loud; we spoke to patrons about it. Others also protested. These cuts were widely seen as unnecessary and harmful,[11] particularly as they are a tiny chunk of change in the overall city budget. After several months of exhausting advocacy, they were mostly reversed. What could we have done with that time and energy if the cuts hadn’t been proposed to begin with?
In my time working for the public library systems, I have seen an awful lot of what is called (by librarians and city workers in other threatened institutions) “the budget dance.”[12] I understand that Mamdani’s administration may believe that this initial budget doesn’t represent their final objective, and that it is therefore okay to use libraries to parlay with Hochul–after all, every other mayor has. But I think that, in New York City, one of the richest cities in America, and the world, our library institutions should not be regularly put on the chopping block while Wall Street brokers take home millions annually from fossil fuel destruction, AI data center expansion, and war. Our city deserves a budget that both focuses on the people here and cultivates education, civic life, and recreation for children, families, and new arrivals– for the millions of people that live here creating, learning and connecting. That is what makes NYC great.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/22/us/alabama-library-defunded-book-bans-hnk
https://www.gothamgazette.com/city/9974-new-york-public-libraries-adjust-pandemic-nyc/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/11/nyregion/library-funding-cuts-eric-adams.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhH4uTMLyTA
https://nycplan.org/nycplan-newsletter-7/
https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2025/03/Libraries-1.pdf
https://newyork.edtrust.org/new-york-citys-1-billion-crisis-education-leaders-urge-pause-on-class-size-mandate/
https://www.wnyc.org/story/inside-the-nypd-unit-mayor-zohran-mamdani-wants-to-dismantle/
https://tribecacitizen.com/2024/08/16/taking-on-the-nypds-cars-on-sidewalks/
https://www.thecity.nyc/2024/06/27/budget-funding-adams-council-library-parks/
https://prismreports.org/2024/03/28/nyc-library-budget-cuts-impacting-most-vulnerable/
You can explore blog posts about “the budget dance” on Urban Librarians Unite’s website here, such as this post from 2012: https://urbanlibrariansunite.org/why-we-still-fight/
HAL SCHRIEVE is the author of Fawn’s Blood (2025), How to Get Over the End of the World (2023), and Out of Salem (2019), which was long-listed for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. Hir indie comic Vivian’s Ghost was on the shortlist for Comics Beat’s 2023 Cartoonist Studio Prize Award for Best Webcomic, and was published in book form by Go Press Girl in 2024. Ze is a librarian.
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