Read All About It: Library System Burglars Are Getting Inside Help - AND - The Mystery Of The Brooklyn Heights Association

Citizens Defending Libraries rally outside City Hall Offices on March 8th to protest the selling off of libraries to benefit real estate developers

What if your home was burglarized?

     . . . .  You’d probably suffer a loss.

What if your home was burglarized by someone who was working closely together with someone inside your household in a position of trust?

    . . . .    You’d probably suffer a loss that was much greater.  

What if the person of trust in the household expected and planned to help the burglar get away with everything (and they along with the burglar) by leaving “receipt” lying in the moonlight in place of the items absconded with that purported to be evidence that you had been “paid” for the items that would no longer be in your possession when, in fact, you would never receive any money for them of any kind?

    . . . . .  You’d probably think that was adding insult to injury and be very much annoyed.

What if your home hadn’t yet been burglarized but you knew that the above scheme was about to unfold and furthermore you knew that the plan when they looted your home was to direct their attention on quickly seizing as many valuable items as they could, starting with the most valuable first.  What if you knew they intended, so that their acts would be as irreversible as possible and would leave as little trace as possible, to melt into bullion the gold watch inherited from your grandfather and to break up the heirloom jewel necklace that came down through your grandmother, recutting its renowned and remarkably large one-of-a-kind stones into smaller unrecognizable fragments?

    . . . . . You might feel an extraordinary sense of urgency about the need to make sure that none of this actually happened.

This then, by analogy, is roughly where we stand with respect to the libraries of New York City which are about to be sold off in a shrinkage of the system intended to create real estate deals to benefit real estate developers.  Insiders within the library systems of New York have been studying the real estate assets they hold on behalf of the public and they are planning to hand them off to developers in deals that haven’t been adequately described or consented to by the public even though it is the public to which these often one-of-a-kind assets truly belong.

That’s why Citizens Defending Libraries, in which I am participating, gave testimony and held a rally a week ago Friday about budget issues related to New York City's libraries at the March 8, 2013 hearings on: New York City Council Fiscal Year 2014 Preliminary Budget, Mayor’s FY ‘13 Preliminary Management Report and Agency Oversight.  (See the picture above.)  Citizens Defending Libraries was joined in giving testimony by representatives from the Committee to Save The New York Public Libraries.  A report on all the testimony is available from Citizens Defending Libraries here: Testimony By Citizens Defending Libraries At March 8, 2013 City Council Committee Hearing On Library Budget Issues.

The prototype deal representing this sort of metaphorical burglary was the sudden 2008 closing of midtown Manhattan’s Donnell Library, for decades one of the city’s main central libraries across from the Museum of Modern Art.  “One of the most heavily used branches,” (according to the New York Times) it was closed suddenly and without warning in the spring of that year for sale and shrinkage and its collections were disbursed.  The sale came not long after the library had undergone a series of significant and expensive renovations which we may consider, were, in the end, publicly paid for.  The initial announcement of the sale, which largely escaped public notice, was in early November of 2007.

50-story Baccarat Hotel and luxury residence tower from the Daily News.  Click to enlarge (if you dare).

There is a 50-story building now going up on the site that was once home to Donnell.  The building, just beginning construction, is expected to be completed in 2014 and will be high-end hotel combined with luxury condominiums.  The huge building will also contain a library vastly reduced in size, what some are calling a “rump library.”  The original Donnell library was 88,000 square feet with 43,000 square feet of public space.  (Numbers reported in Library Journal when library officials were giving out information about the sale said that Donnell was only 84,000 square feet.)  In total area the new library at 28,000 square feet will be only one third the size of what it is replacing.  There are varying figures for the reduced amount of public space, between 19,000 square feet (44% of the previous public space) and 23,000 square feet (53% but that would leave even less pace for the kind of books and media previously available at the library.)

Was this creation of a huge, vastly larger building with such significantly shrunk library intended to benefit the library system and the public?  That hardly seems a supportable proposition. 

For those watching with interest as other deals unfold using the Donnell prototype as a model there are some lessons to be learned:

    •    When the Donnell sale was first and suddenly announced the information was given out that it would be replaced by a much smaller building than has actually turned out to be the case.  It was announced that the building that would replace the library would be am eleven-story hotel, not a 50-story building.

(* When the sale was announced, one piece of information that was marshaled to the fore was the almost reassuring cozy detail that the new hotel would have a connecting entrance through “The 21 Club” on 52nd Street in the somewhat precious low-rise townhouse on the other side of the block, a restaurant full of memorabilia, evoking its speakeasy history and, off course certain elite and clubby associations, a place of renowned familiarity to go to get a very expensive hamburger where they traditionally insisted all the men wear a tie and jacket.  It's the building outside of which you see the line of painted cast iron lawn jockeys.)

    •    When the Donnell sale was announced the public was told that the library would close in a year, in the fall of 2008, but instead they closed it suddenly almost six months sooner.

    •    The public was told that the new library to replace the Donnell would be “completed in no more than three-and-one-half years” which means it should have opened in the fall of 2011.  Now more than a year after that projected date the replacement library is still not expected to arrive on the scene until at least 2014.

    •    The real estate deal and closing of the library was being rushed.  Consequently, the real estate transaction for which the library was closed was not adequately locked up with signatures, documented and assured, and it did not consummate.  Taking such risks may have potentially benefitted those involved in putting together the real estate transaction. Taking those risks did not benefit the public.

    •    When Donnell was closed the public (and Manhattan’s Community Board 5) was promised a temporary library in the same vicinity.  That promise was also not fulfilled.

    •    Despite all the city funding going into Donnell and to the New York Public Library, library officials chose to sell off Donnell without informing public officials, including the City Council, about it and without input from the public or librarian professionals.

    •    When Donnell was closed the public was told that Donnell was in serious need of repairs even though it had just been renovated.  It should be a warning (see Citizens Defending Libraries testimony) that among the repairs presenting insurmountable problems was an “outdated air-conditioning” system.  It now seems guaranteed that when library officials want to sell libraries for real estate deals they will reflexively cite air conditioning as a problem and conjure up amazing estimates of the costs that would be involved in dealing with the problem, thereby justifying demolition of public assets.

This past Tuesday I testified before the budget committee of Manhattan’s Community Board 5. The annual cycle of reviewing and advocating for adequate city funding of the libraries is upon us again so this issue was before them. I told them that what had not been stopped with respect to the Donnell debacle within the Community Board 5 boundary lines was now being continued with a similar shrinkages of other main libraries with the Central Library Plan, and once again it was being done in obeisance to real estate industry priorities.  (The Central Library Plan involves the shrinkage and consolidating sell-offs of the Mid-Manhattan Library, the Science Library (SIBL) and the Tilden Astor 42nd Street Central Reference Library with a ripping out of the research stacks at the Central Reference Library, effectively decommissioning it as the research library it was meant to be and has functioned as since 1910.  I also pointed out how the Donnell prototype was being exported with similar deals now being proposed in my own home borough of Brooklyn.

Community Board 5 Committee Agenda

My message was that because the line had not held at Donnell, because there had been no successful insistence on redress and rectification of the plundering, that now all libraries in the city were in jeopardy.  And I told them that if we can’t hold the line at libraries, we won’t be able to hold the line at anything in this city.

At this point I should probably deal with the metaphor of the home burglar and the insider trusted within the householder expecting that they can somehow get away with their theft by leaving a “receipt” that says the burglarized homeowner is being paid for the stolen items.  What the public is being told as these properties belonging to the public are plundered is that they can expect to be “paid” for whatever is sold, that somehow money will go into the library system as a result.  In fact, because money is fungible (so that the money does not go to the libraries), the situation is quite the reverse: Whatever money might somehow with a theatrical flourish be earmarked as theoretically going to libraries as a result of any of these transactions, the city, under Bloomberg, is pursuing a plan of cutting library funding to the bone, engaging in an absolute starvation of the system.  And because Bloomberg’s incentive is to underfund the libraries, to “demolish" them "by neglect” with the goal of pushing through these fire sales benefitting buddies in the real estate industry, the pursuit of these pending sales is actually bringing library funding to an unprecedented all-time low.

Chart from Center For An Urban For Future report showing sharp decline in funding against escalating use.   That bump in blue funding line is the third term elections.  The steep decline is implementation of the plan to sell libraries.

In the scheme of things it is important to remember that library funding is a relative pittance.  Here from my Friday Citizens Defending Libraries testimony:

    That libraries are underfunded is without doubt: “More people visited public libraries in New York than every major sports team and every major cultural institution combined.” . .

    . . .. . . Libraries are the little guys.  They are a pittance that should be easy to include in the city budget, especially given that the money goes far since libraries are so well used.

So I made the point to the Community Board 5 board members at the Tuesday committee meeting that not only is the Donnell Library real estate deal being exported outside the boundaries of their community district, this has also resulted in an underfunding of the library system being exported to every borough of the city.  I called upon them to rectify the Donnell situation and also to examine and stop the Central Library Plan that, although it is impossible to know exactly how much it will cost (and figures and designs keep changing), will be very expensive in a foolhardy way.  The reason that plan calls for money to be used so stupidly, rather than in the much better ways in which it could be used,  is that it concentrates on generating the still under wraps real estate deals the public presently has very little consciousness of.

Michael Leslie of Citiznes Defending Libraries and Veronika Conant of the Committee to Save The New York Public Library waiting to testify before the committee

Eric Stern, the head of the Community Board 5 Committee, told those of us who were there to testify against the planned real estate sell-offs that he and others on the board were in favor of the Central Library Plan and had previously committed to it because they had listened to a presentation of it by the New York Public Library President Anthony Marx and they believed him.  I told them that they had ample reason to reconsider any commitments to the plan given that the numbers, not yet defined, keep changing and, that as Veronika Conant from the Committee To Save The New York Public Library was about to testify, her committee has promulgated a valuable new truth document (press release here) providing ample reason not to believe what was in President Marx's presentation.

President George W. Bush may have had a problem conceptualizing what exact rules are supposed to apply about allowing the same people to fool you twice: I would expect a lot more from Community Board 5.

Has Community Board 5 really taken all those bullet-pointed lessons from Donnell appearing above and applied them to the Central Library Plan?  Have they considered how tall a building will be put up when Mid-Manhattan is sold?  What about SIBL?  What exactly is the public being told at this point and what should the public be told?  Are there new behemoths the size of the Chrysler Buildings in the making- The bulk but not the beauty- looking like the hotel going up where the Donnell stood?

Still from video NYPL has produced to promote the Central Library Plan's consolidation and shrinkage

In one respect the week-ago-Friday City Council budget hearings before the Committee chaired by City Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer provided an interesting additional connection between the libraries of Manhattan and the sales in Brooklyn that are being modeled after the Donnell sale.  In Brooklyn one of the two first deals the Brooklyn Public Library is trying to push out the door is a sale of a central library at 280 Cdman Plaza on the border of Brooklyn Heights and Downtown Brooklyn.

Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer and crew hearing testimony

The three heads of the three library systems all testified at Van Bramer's hearing: Dr. Anthony W. Marx, head of the NYPL, Linda E. Johnson head of the BPL and Thomas W. Galante head of the Queens Library System.  (These separate library systems cover all of New York City.  As they all receive the lion's share of their funding from the city they effectively function as one overall system in this regard.)

As President Marx answered questions it could be observed that he was constantly being fed information by Chief Operating Officer David G. Offensend.

Mr. Offensend is a resident of Brooklyn Heights living on Monroe Street just a few very short blocks from the Brooklyn Heights library now proposed to be sold off in a rushed hand-off to a developer before the end of Mayor Bloomberg’s term and before the required public reviews take place.  Neighbors have complained to me that he has been prodevelopement in the neighborhood and at the same time not sufficiently open about things he is moving forward.  Mr. Offensend was appointed by Mayor Bloomberg in 2010 as a board member to (in the words of Bloomberg’s own press release) “the new Brooklyn Bridge Park Corporation, the new City-controlled entity that will guide the future of the park.”  ("City-controlled" in that press release was a euphemism for mayor-controlled, unlike a typical city park: Monday, May 24, 2010, Looking a Gift Horse in the Mouth? An Examination of Brooklyn Bridge Park in Terms of the Politics of Development.  And pay particular attention to Part 2.)


Mr.Offensend, who hails originally from the world of investment banking, is also a “past president of the Brooklyn Heights Association.”   More recently, he was just a Brooklyn Heights Association board member.  He isn’t any longer, but the possibility that people in the neighborhood like Mr. Offensend might still have influence with members of the Brooklyn Heights Association board is a matter of serious alert particularly in that the BHA is showing a perplexing lack of concern about the attack and elimination of the neighborhood’s library and seems also to care very little about how this attack is part of a system-wide plundering of library resources.  More on this in a moment. Without organizations such as the BHA rising to join ranks with others facing similar jeopardy throughout the city we can expect that the city’s real estate industry will get its way in decimating the system.

David G. Offensend

There is a very long, thoughtful two-part article about the Central Library Plan and the future of libraries in this city, including why the bruited `digital future' in very problematic terms hasn’t really arrived (if it ever will).  I commend it to everyone: Lions in Winter, by Charles Petersen, May 9, 2012.  In Part Two of that article, Mr. Petersen spends some time focusing on Mr. Offensend as being representative of the new regime that the new breed of Wall Street/hedge fund manager trustees has installed at the New York Public Library:

Many conversations returned to the figure of David Offensend, co-founder of Evercore Partners, a private equity firm with a market capitalization of a billion dollars. Offensend joined the library in 2004, in part because the trustees felt that the institution’s money was not being handled with due care; he now serves as chief operating officer. According to staffers, Offensend has been instrumental in the shift toward a “business and metrics” sort of thinking. He told the Princeton alumni website in 2009, “If an organization is receptive, the application of business world experiences can have a huge positive impact.” But what kind of business and what kind of metrics? It was under Offensend that Booz Allen was brought in; it was under Offensend, and in the wake of the Schwarzman gift [$100 million in March 2008, a date that coincides with the Donnell sale], that the ambitious plan to fundamentally reconfigure the library took shape. Offensend described the plan to me this way: “We did not think that putting the central library in [the main building] was an investment per se in the branch libraries versus the research libraries. It was rather one plus one will equal significantly more than two.” We can see here the familiar arithmetic of corporate downsizing.

Mr. Offensend started with the NYPL in 2004 so he was working for the library when the Donnell sell-off plan was fabricated.

Mr. Petersen’s article is full of detailed observations based on interviews of those within the system about how the “public has been consulted only very minimally on the library’s decisions,” how preparatory to the machinations going on many of the skilled librarians who might have spoken up for and advocated for the books and collections and for the library as a research institution were forced out, required to sign agreements not to “disparage or encourage or induce others to disparage” the library, how the people now running the library “doesn’t care about research.”

Mr. Petersen ends his article by pointing out that while those pressing for the Central Library Plan (and its associated real estate sell-offs and shrinkage of the library system say they are `democratizng’ the library, that is not the case:

More than anything, this rhetoric reveals the fundamentally anti-democratic worldview that has taken hold at the library. It is of a piece with what the new Masters of the Universe have accomplished in the public schools, where hedge funders have provided the lion’s share of the backing for privatization, and in the so-called reforms to our financial system, where technocrats meet behind closed doors to decide what will be best for the rest of us. Oligarchs acting in the people’s name (with the people’s money) is not democratic; selling off New York’s cultural patrimony to out-of-town heiresses, closing down treasured divisions and branches, pushing out expert staff, and shipping books to a warehouse in the suburbs, all without consulting the public, is not democratic. If the reconstruction goes through, scholarly research will be more, not less, concentrated in the handful of inordinately wealthy and exclusive colleges and universities. The renovation is elitism garbed in populist rhetoric, ultimately condescending to the very people the library’s board thinks they’re serving. . . .

New York Times architectural critic Michael Kimmelman has made the same observation and in Noticing New York, building on Kimmelman’s observation, I pointed out the bigger picture truth: The effect of these cutbacks and shrinkages of service is going to fall very heavily on those of lower income and the less advantaged in our society.  See: Saturday, February 9, 2013, Libraries That Are Now Supposedly “Dilapidated” Were Just Renovated: And Are Developers’ Real Estate Deals More Important Than Bryant Park?

As Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones has said, public libraries are a “great equalizer.”

Every year for more than two decades I have gone on the Brooklyn Height House Tour, the annual mainstay fund raiser for the Brooklyn Heights Association, where the showcase houses of the wealthy and well-off in Brooklyn Heights are put on display.  What I have noticed, true to this day, is that those homes, with a lot of space to fill and a lot of money to fill up that space up with are, more often than not, full of books everywhere, lots of shelves, sometimes stacked, almost always by the bedside and in the master bedrooms.  The owners of one house recently showcased ripped out a floor to devote space to a beautiful multi-level personal library with balconies ringing the upper level.

It’s not that these home don’t also have computers.  They do.  And CDs and internet access.  They have everything.  What this means is that the underfunding and shrinkage of libraries isn’t only failing to address what David Giles calls the “digital divide” in his Center For An Urban Future report, Branches of Opportunity, that growing separation of opportunity between those who have computers and access to the internet.  We are opening up a brand new chasm, those with access to books and those without.

The Brooklyn Heights Association recently posted (3/14/'13) its position on the sale and shrinkage of the Brooklyn Heights library in an untitled, undated, Community Alert.  Aside from its appalling inclusion of many grossly misleading and inaccurate statements (so many I will have to deal with it at length elsewhere) the statement of position is frightening in how closely it parallels the position of the Brooklyn Public Library itself.  It adopts inaccurate speaking points hewed to by the BPL and doesn't advocate to oppose the shrinkage and sale the BPL wants.  That is notwithstanding that it ends with the statement that the BHA we expects “to be strong advocates for a new library that meets the needs of our community.”

By comparison, the BHA is asking for far less with respect to the Brooklyn Heights library than Community Board 5 was asking for when it was opposing the Donnell Library closing in its community.  Community Board 5 didn’t get what it asked for and it has since lapsed in addressing the issue but the BHA isn’t putting up a fight at all.  It may consequently expect to achieve even less than Manhattan's Community Board 5 achieved.

One could have supposed that Anthony Marx as president of the NYPL might not have needed to have been fed so many basic figures by his chief operating officer, David Offensend given, that Marx is, most assuredly, a very handsomely paid individual.  Exactly what he is paid does not seem to have been made a matter of public record yet, but a 2006 New York Times article commented on how Mr. Marx's predecessor in office, Paul LeClerc, was paid $800,000 (plus an unneeded $136,110 as a housing allowance) according to the most recent NYPL tax return filed that year, which the article noted was a jump of more than $221,000 from the year prior.  See: November 19, 2006, New York Library Officials’ Pay? Shhh, by Serge F. Kovaleski.

The article was noting how the NYPL was paying these high-escalating salaries to the president and others at a time when it had “declared itself in some financial distress” and was selling off assets like the “Kindred Spirits” 1849 Hudson River School landscape by Asher B. Durand, some of them at prices “less than their estimated value.”

The most recent return filed by the NYPL for 2011, the year Marx was appointed to replace LeClerc, does not show Mark’s salary but shows that the all-in annual compensation for LeClerc at that point (including some minimal deferred compensation) was $1,408,757.  That's right: well over one million dollars annually. (See the chart from the tax form.)

From Federal tax return, top NYPL salaries in 2011.  Click to enlarge

David Offensend’s all-in annual compensation for that year was $372,712. (Also in the chart.)

The Times article about these rising management salaries ends with a statement from Mayor Bloomberg via a spokesman endorsing the stupendous salaries:

“The mayor through his experience on about 20 nonprofit boards and as chairman of Johns Hopkins University believes that the public and nonprofit sectors need strong management, and they should pay for it.”

In his Lions In Winter article (Part 1) about changes at the NYPL Charles Petersen discusses salaries in a concluding footnote where he analyses library budget figures to note that a flow of additional funds into the NYPL were not going into:

    •    collections (“the amount of linear feet of archives being taken in at the New York Public Library is now a tenth of what it was in the 1990s”)

    •    traditional research library staff salaries (“whose numbers. .  dropped from 703 in 1990 to 454 in 2010, and whose total salaries and benefits remained stagnant for much of this time at around $30 million.”)

    •    Nor for computers or access to the internet.

He observes the that part “of the increase has been due to a rise in pay for the library’s senior management, whose total budget went from $9.8 million to $14.1 million between 1991 and 2010" but makes an even more interesting observation about how increasing baseline library costs are associated with the hiring somewhat mysterious staff that are not traditional library workers:

    . . . bringing together all of the publicly available data on the library’s budget shows that much of the increase in baseline costs has gone to pay the salaries and benefits of staff members whom the library, in the data it provides to the ARL, has not reported as part of its traditional staff. In 2010, these staff members received $28 million a year in salaries and benefits; the research library’s more traditional staff received only $26 million.

    What exactly do these people do? They’re not senior management, and they’re not fundraisers. I asked the PR department repeatedly for more information and never received a definitive answer. Some of these staff members work for the digital department; others could be traditional catalogers who, since the research cataloging department was recently merged with the circulating cataloging department, may perhaps not be reported to the ARL. Many of the former staff members with whom I spoke suggested that a notable portion of these funds may be going to the library’s internal strategy department. A single department couldn’t account for such a large increase, but when asked about the current budget for the strategy department a library spokesperson could not provide a figure. Considering the amount of money going to these and other staff members, this is a subject more journalists may want to investigate.

The heads of the Brooklyn Public Library and the Queens Library are not quite so well paid although many an average citizen would be jealous of their salaries.  Linda E. Johnson of the BPL gets an all-in compensation figure of $333,109 according to the most recent tax filing by the BPL (see below).  Thomas W. Galante of the Queens systems gets an all-in compensation figure of $488,503 according to the most recent tax filing by the Queens system (see next chart extracted below).

From last filed Federal tax return, top BPL salaries.  Click to enlarge

From last filed Federal tax return, top Queens Library salaries.  Click to enlarge

Meanwhile, librarians themselves are fighting lay-offs, shorter hours and cuts to the system.

Union rally on steps of City Hall held last Wednesday by DC 37 asking for baseline funding for libraries as insulation against political funding games, "dwarf tossing" (and shenanigans to had off the system's public real estate to insiders)  

What are these salaries about?  High salaries for senior administrators and people in the NYPL “strategy department”? What about the relatively higher and skyrocketing of salaries in Manhattan vs. Brooklyn and Queens?  Isn’t it all about real estate?  Aren’t these the salaries of people who play high-stakes real estate shell games and engage in the high-stakes finances and behind-the-scenes arrangements, partnerships and syndications that power it?   People who are more in the class of Stephen Allen Schwarzman, the head of chairman and CEO of the Blackstone Group?  Mr. Schwarzman's Blackstone is a huge private investment, real estate and mergers and acquisition and hedge fund investment firm with interests, among other things, in hotels (a very early focus of its investments in real estate). 

Redundant, or undeserved, acknowledgment?

Mr. Schwarzman is the trustee on the board of the NYPL who is understood to be driving the NYPL Central Library consolidation, shrinkage and sell-off plan the hardest.  He is also the trustee whose name has now been placed on the Central Reference Library where these highly-paid administrators are now proposing to demolish the research stacks in preparation for this system shrinkage.  His name was placed upon the building as a result of his $100 million  “gift” to the library in March 2008, contemporaneous with the announcement of the closing and sell-off of Donnell to create a hotel and the inauguration of the Central Library Plan that he champions.

As noted, the sell-off and shrinkage of Donnell was announced in early November 2007.  Only a few years before, in February 2004, the library was celebratorily announcing a $275,000 renovation in Donnell of the “teen center,” the Nathan Straus Young Adult Center aka, Teen Central.  The NYPL described it as a “state-of-the-art facility,” a “teen room featuring hip-hop music, teen-friendly furniture, and Wi-Fi access.”   The NYPL also said, “With a collection of over 10,000 books, Teen Central has been the central collection for teenagers for The New York Public Library since the Donnell Library Center opened in 1955.”  The renovation involved a “complete redesign of the interior public service areas.”

The beginning of the NYPL press release announcing the 2003 renovation of the teen center, the Nathan Straus Young Adult Center

With the demolition of Donnell, so went the teen center and everything that had been put into it.  Funding for the renovation was said to have been made possible, in part, with funds from the Estate of Charlotte H. Porter, and while that gift is thereby lost it was what was supposed to have been a gift to the public, so the public lost something and whatever other funds paid for the renovation whether they came from the city (as is often the case) or not, this was public property and therefore a waste for the public.

There was another recent renovation of the Donnell that was similarly jettisoned to history's dust heap. There was a relatively new auditorium and media center.  My understanding is that they were the product of a renovation completed in 2000-2001.  I was told, but I don't have verification, that the cost involved over a million and a half dollars provided by the city.  Whatever the case I am sure that the cost of the renovation was significant and in the end the loss of these things is a loss to the public.

I was in the Donnell auditorium October 3, 2007, just one month before announcement of the Donnell sale so I remember that the condition of the auditorium was excellent and it looked relatively new.  I was there for a well-attended (sold out), well-reported event held by the Municipal Art Society. The event was “Is New York Losing Its Soul?,” the first of a series of panel discussions MAS was holding with respect to its then- running Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York exhibit. The panelists were New York Times columnist Clyde Haberman, Alison Tocci of Time Out New York, author Tama Janowitz,  Darren Walker, a VP of the Rockefeller Foundation, and Rocco Landesman of Jujamcyn Theaters.  (See: Thursday, October 4, 2007, Is New York Losing Its Soul?, Thursday, October 04, 2007, Is New York losing its soul? Sort of, panelists say (and one targets AY), Sunday, October 07, 2007, New York's soul lost? 'New York Calling' fills in some gaps, Coverage of Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York, the exhibit, public programs and walking tours, Panel Discussion: Is New York Losing Its Soul?)

The event is available to watch in a video (inserted below) which I recommend if you have the time.  Here is an image of the event from that video in which you can get some sort of sense of the auditorium.  (Another image is available here.)  

Donnell auditorium being used for Jane Jacobs event in 2007, just before its announced destruction.  Less than ten years after its expensive renovation? 

You can also see pictures of the destroyed Donnell as it was being gutted in a series of images from Driven By Boredom at The Donnell Library Center: A Eulogy In Pictures, December 11th 2008, (and here) three of which are below.

Again, the cavalier sacrifice of these new and recently publicly paid for renovations to the deities of real estate help accentuate our recognition of how senselessly galling these losses are, but it is important to remember that, in the end, it isn't just the recent renovation work that is being scrapped: It is also most importantly the irreplaceable underlying assets.  For those who remember it, the Donnell was made of the same Indiana limestone as Rockefeller Center, two blocks away, and shared in some of its stately graciousness.

The New York Times reporting on the “Is New York Losing Its Soul?” event finished with some resonating lines ending in a profound question.  (See: Panel Discussion: Has New York Lost Its Soul?, by Sewell Chan, October 4, 2007)

The discussion that evening addressed many of the uneasy ills confronting the city in terms of overdevelopement, the carelessness thereof, and the increasing disparities between conspicuous wealth lack of wealth.  One of the lines in the midst of the evening was Clyde Haberman's comment that Mayor Michael Bloomberg never met a developer he didn't like.  The concluding lines of the Times article actually came out of an exchange that concerned the privatization we are seeing as ever more ubiquitous “business improvement districts” (BIDs) are taking over and assuming what used to be government functions.   Nevertheless they have application to what is happening with the sell-off of libraries and the shrinkage and underfunding of the system that accompanies such a sacking of the public’s assets.

The resonating words were spoken by Darren Walker, a vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation:

There is something profoundly wrong when government cannot deliver basic services . . .
. . .  Where is the public commons? Who owns the public commons?”

So does it help that they say that when we sell off our irreplaceable libraries those theoretically trusted insiders on the inside who are assisting will be leaving a receipt, as if we have been adequately compensated for the loss?      

Tossing Dwarfs?: It’s Time To Demand That We Change The Way We Fund Libraries . . End The False Political Theater

Aragorn throwing Gimli in "The Two Towers"

It turns out that there was an inside joke buried in the Lord of the Rings trilogy that, as many times as those films have been watched in my own household, I never realized was there until just days ago.  It turns out there has also been an inside joke going around during the Bloomberg years having to do with the annual budget negotiations to fund the city’s libraries.  Whatever good fun might have been intended by the crew creating LOTR, when it comes to the annual negotiations between the City Council and the mayor to fund the libraries the laugh is squarely on the little guys of this city, and I am afraid those of us who are considered “little guys” includes all but a very elite few.

I never knew there was something called “dwarf tossing.”  Those insiders who know about it and like to play the game are often viewing it as something of a sport, even though its ethics have been debated by the United Nations.  ‘Tossees’ have been killed.  That ought to be enough to readily turn one against the practice but you can nevertheless find erudite essays on the ethics of  “dwarf tossing” on the internet.  I am referring to the pursuit that literally involves the tossing around of dwarfs as some sort of perverse entertainment but those same essays would apply almost equally well to what has been going on in the yearly battles about library budgets in the Bloomberg era: It has been turned into a circus, an intentional kind of political theater and I am informed that the insiders, viewing the show wryly and dismissive of its genuineness, refer to it by the same term, “dwarf tossing.”

The idea is that libraries are the little guys, a pittance that should be easy to include in the city budget, especially given that the money goes far since libraries are so well used: “More people visited public libraries in New York than every major sports team and every major cultural institution combined.”   Libraries are the little guys about whom almost everybody will care as their fates get a cruel tossing around every year to create a distraction.  Lots of New Yorker’s don’t have time to spend figuring out the New York City budget leaving, such concerns to their elected officials.  Those who do care enough to start learning a little, but not enough, are going to be satisfied with the battle that is put up for show: Big bad mayor cuts libraries, the City Council does battle and in the end City Council members and Borough Presidents ride in like heroes with discretionary funds to make up some of the cuts.

What’s wrong with this picture is that none of it should be going on the first place and that in the end, despite the pleasing happy-ending show of heroism, it still leaves the libraries underfunded.  So underfunded, in fact, that now at the end of the Bloomberg era as part of an overall bigger end-of-term fire sale to the real estate industry* Bloomberg is getting ready to sell off libraries and shrink the system.

(* Mid-town rezoning anyone?)

This is not what City Council or Borough President discretionary funds are for.  And if the City Council and Borough Presidents have the imagination for how those funds ought to be better used (and they indeed should) they ought to be screaming their heads off about the intentional underfunding of libraries, not content that "saving libraries" is an easy way to use the funds while looking as if they are riding to the rescue on a white horse.

First, before we go any further, here is our nugget of Lord of the Rings trivia, the hidden joke for those in the LOTR know.  We should establish, up front Aragorn is a full-sized human being and Gimli is from the Middle Earth’s race of dwarfs:

    Aragorn: It's a long way.

    Gimli: Toss me.

    Aragorn: What?

    Gimli: I cannot jump the distance, you'll have to toss me.
    [pauses, looks up at Aragorn]

    Gimli: Don't tell the elf.

    Aragorn: Not a word.

Important to the joke is that the elves of Middle Earth are full-sized individuals.  You see it’s embarrassing to be tossed around just because you're littler.  This scene is actually a follow-up to an earlier scene in the saga where, at the broken bridge in the Mines of Moria, Gimli told Aragorn, “Nobody tosses a dwarf!” before jumping over a large gap himself.  The Lord of the Rings was filmed in New Zealand, one of the countries where literal “dwarf tossing” is apparently much more common.

Tomorrow, Friday, the City Council is holding a committee hearing on the library budgets. Noticing New York has previously linked to and quoted the new Center For An Urban Future:  Report - Branches of Opportunity, by David Giles, January 2013, but one Noticing New York reader pointed out some language from that report, noting its relevance to the hearing.

Said our reader:

For anyone considering speaking at the City Council Budget Hearing next week, here is a link to a report which gives some useful background information about the citywide library budget and what Councilmember Van Bramer, who will be chairing the hearing, thinks of the way it is being managed under this administration. The report, "Branches of Opportunity" comes from a business-oriented think tank, and probably some of us would dispute parts of it, but the criticisms of the budget process at page 30 are worth a look. As you probably know, unlike many other cities, New York does not have a fixed operating budget baseline for libraries, treating them not as city agencies but as charities, and this leads to annual political dramas in which their budgets are drastically cut and partially restored. The report documents the incremental but draconian cuts over time, masked by the publicity about restoring funding. The full report is available at www.nycfuture.org.

The language from the report our reader directs attention to is (emphasis supplied by NNY):

Despite record attendance and circulation numbers, and a dramatically expanded list of programs and resources, New York City libraries face a number of serious challenges to their continued success-and number one, without a doubt, is funding. All three library systems have experienced funding cuts totaling tens of millions of dollars in recent years, but cuts aren't their only financial obstacle. In many ways, the lack of security afforded by the city's budget process has been at least as big a problem.

Although libraries depend on the city for the lion's share of their budgets, they are technically independent 501(c)(3) entities, not government agencies. Like spending for other non-profit cultural institutions and several city programs like the Summer Youth Employment Program, library budgets are often not completely accounted for in the mayor's Financial Plan, a document that balances expenditures with real and expected revenues over several years. Instead, when it comes time to enact a given year's budget, the City Council tends to negotiate higher funding levels for libraries than is called for in the Financial Plan. According to observers, this process gives the mayor more control over the final budget and lets council members look like heroes when they produce the inevitable restorations. However, the revenue sources both parties agree upon in order to provide library funding are guaranteed for only one year. The discrepancy between the libraries' ostensible budget as seen in the Financial Plan and their actual budget has tended to not only continue from year to year but widen even further.

In 2007, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn acknowledged the toll this annual Kabuki dance can take on an agency's effectiveness and, along with several other government supported organizations and programs, announced the city's intention to start "baselining" library budgets in the Financial Plan. That summer the city increased library funding by $42 million, which enabled the libraries to extend hours and grow their user base, but the city never got around to correcting the accounting gimmick that shorts libraries in the Financial Plan.

After the financial crisis in the fall of 2008, the gap between the libraries' ostensible budgets in the Financial Plan and their actual budgets grew so large that in 2011 they faced the prospect of a truly catastrophic $100 million cut. Although the June budget deal once again restored the vast majority of that proposed cut, efforts to win back the funds ate up significant human and financial resources-resources that could have been deployed toward long-term planning and fund raising efforts.

"So much manpower is wasted on responding to cuts and threats of cuts," says Jimmy Van Bramer, chairman of the City Council's committee on libraries and cultural institutions. "You have to find ways to save funds, close floors, cut hours-the planning effort is immense." According to some library officials, the lack of a baseline also makes it difficult to fundraise from private sources, since some funders want to be assured that they're not just filling in a budget hole created by the city.

Moreover, as we have already seen, the libraries aren't held completely harmless in the end. Even though the yearly restorations tend to get framed by council members and the press as "wins" for the libraries, since Fiscal Year 2008, all three systems have in fact suffered significant cuts. Brooklyn and Queens have seen their budgets reduced by around $15 million each since 2008, and NYPL has suffered a nearly $24 million reduction, not counting a new round of mid-year cuts announced late last year.

All three systems have reduced their acquisition budgets and hours of service in response.

While this report notes that City Council Speaker Christine Quinn called for an end to the annual Kabuki dance in 2007 what actually happened (after a brief uptick in funding when the mayor, Quinn, and others ran in 2009 for third terms under the city charter they altered for that purpose) the “dwarf-tossing” dance of destruction continued with plummeting city funding.  This plummet in funding was (coincidentally?) at the exact same time the library systems, following the model launched when the Donnell Library (not yet reopened) was closed for shrinkage in 2008.  In assessing the work of powerful politicians like Quinn, I would advise that it is always more important to judge by results than by rhetoric.

Chart from Center From Urban For Future report showing sharp decline in funding against escalating use.   That bump in funding? The third term elections.

As Noticing New York has pointed out in previous articles this underfunding is being used by city officials collaborating with library officials (often not very differentiated from each other) to manufacture plausibility when they say that the libraries now have to be sold off because they are underfunded.

To those following real estate in this city, Kabuki dance theater of this kind will probably seem very analogues to what they see in the various land use and zoning hearing and review processes where developers come making requests padded with some palpably absurd notions so that local elected officials can be heroes when they then excise them.  But in the end development abuses that shouldn’t be allowed still wind up being approved.

Here is another version of “dwarf tossing” Kabuki theater connected to library budgets.

The Brooklyn Public Library, one branch of the city’s tripartite system (all funded principally by the city), has two libraries in mind to sell off at the top of longer, now admitted but still undisclosed list, that according to what the BLP itself is making public, potentially includes virtually every library in Brooklyn as a target.  One of these first two libraries on the hit list is the current Brooklyn Heights library, actually two libraries functioning together on an integrated basis (the neighborhood’s branch library and the central business district's historic Business and Career library).  The other is the Pacific Branch library, the first of the historic Carnegie libraries to open in Brooklyn.

Why these two libraries? One in Brooklyn Heights bordering Brooklyn’s Downtown, the other right within close view of the “Barclays” arena (both are adjacent to the properties of ubiquitous Ratner mega-monopoly)?  This Tuesday night at a community meeting about the Pacific Branch library’s future organized by City Council Member Steve Levin, BPL spokesman Josh Nachowitz, BPL’s VP of Government and Community Relations confirmed what was written here in Noticing New York first, that the BPL’s priority is to move the highest valued real estate out the door first.
   
Thursday night of last week I went to a public committee meeting about the proposed sale of the Brooklyn Heights library.  You can read about it here: Controversial Brooklyn Heights library sale to proceed at ‘fast trot’ By Mary Frost, March 4, 2013, Brooklyn Daily Eagle.  Full disclosure: The Carolyn McIntyre who appears in that article representing the group Citizens Defending Libraries, which has so far gathered more than 8,000 signatures on a petition protesting the sale of this and other libraries in the city (together with their underfunding), is my wife.

`No filming here' Josh Nachowitz (with beard, top) tells cameraman- Click to enlarge

Last week’s Thursday night meeting was very different from the community meeting held by Steve Levin Tuesday.  For one thing, Mr. Nachowitz was very definitely running the Thursday meeting.  You could tell this because, when Citizens Defending Libraries was setting up to film the meeting, Mr. Nachowitz (with another assistant from the library) very firmly told the cameraman he was not permitting any filming.  He did this without consulting any of the other attendees at the meeting such as the representatives of the elected officials, the Brooklyn Heights Association or the Friends of the Library group.  (The meeting was being held theoretically at the suggestion of the Brooklyn Heights Association.)

Had the meeting been filmed you could have seen some “dwarf tossing” in action.  One of the things you could have seen was Dan Wiley, representative of Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez, coming in, sitting down and telling Mr. Nachowitz, “Now I’m sitting here thinking, why is Josh talking for the libraries?  I’m seeing EDC.  For me you’ll always be EDC.” [a lot of laughter from all around the table ensued] (EDC is the mayor’s real estate development agency where Mr. Nachowitz was working only a little while ago.)  Mr. Nachowitz guffawed and responded jovially, “We’ll get to that.  It’s all connected.”

Another way you could tell that Mr. Nachowitz was running the show was that, unlike the Pacific Branch community meeting (where Mr. Nachowitz answers were not exactly forthright or satisfactory), in this meeting Mr. Nachowitz wasn’t answering any questions he didn’t want to.  He was simply pocketing them literally and figuratively.  He didn’t answer oral questions he didn’t want to, saying they could answered in the future.  In addition, although the public was not allowed to participate except that Carolyn McIntyre was permitted to make an opening statement on behalf of the Citizens Defending Libraries and the 8,000 signature petition, the public was allowed to pass questions on cards to the representatives present on behalf of the elected officials.  These wound up mostly unanswered in Nachowitz’s pocket and at one point Nachowitz even intercepted and pocketed one such question card that Jim Vogel of State Senator Velmanette Montgomery’s office attempted to pass for information to Deborah Hallen of the Friends of the Library Group.

One of the questions Mr. Nachowitz pocketed without answering

One of the questions Mr. Nachowitz was not answering is whether it was envisioned that there would be any deed restrictions (enforceable by the BHA and the city) limiting the height of any new tower replacing the library to, say perhaps to the 40 stories that have been talked about internally by library officials. By contrast, Tuesday night Mr. Nachowitz was forced to address the subject of deed restrictions in connection with the sale of the Pacific Branch library at Councilman Levin’s community meeting.  Linda Johnson, the BPL CEO, recently spearheaded an article defending the sale that put out an estimation that the city (not the library system) might receive $100 million for the sell-off of the Brooklyn Heights library site.  It's possible that Johnson was just puffing to drum up support for a sale, but if that number were accurate it would translate into a very big building.  (With figures like this being thrown around, libraries still have to be significantly shrunk for lack of funds?- Under the BPL plan, the Brooklyn Heights Library will give up 62,000 square feet to get back perhaps only 15,000 square feet.)

Another pocketed and unanswered question

50-story Baccarat Hotel and luxury residence tower from the Daily News.  Click to enlarge (if you dare).

$100 million is a much larger figure than the $67.4 million for which the Manhattan site of the Donnell library was sold (to create a half-size library) in 2011 where they are building a 50-story Baccarat Hotel and luxury residence tower.  It’s a much larger price to pay for a demolition site (demolition involves a cost, just like building) than the $81 million being paid for the already existing and in very good condition historic fourteen-story Bossert Hotel in late 2012.

Bossert Hotel on Montague Street.  It goes all the way back to Remsen Street

At the beginning of the meeting Mr. Nachowitz, making a show of politeness, thanked Ms. McIntyre for her statement and said:

A lot of what you said and a lot of what’s in your petition really speaks to what we are trying to do here.  It’s actually hugely helpful and it’s part of the message we’ve been trying to deliver to the city for years and years and years.  We face huge budget cuts every year. . [Lost lots of funding etc.]. . The elected officials who sit at this table have been absolutely fantastic advocates for the library, especially the city council, the state legislature, everybody’s been terrific.  We wouldn’t be open at all in this building or anywhere else were it not for the unrelenting advocacy and support of the Brooklyn City Council delegation and the state legislative delegation.  So everybody who works for an elected official in this room deserves a huge round of applause for what they’ve done to support the library. . .

We would all love that your petition would be hugely successful and we’ll get the mayor and the administration to seek change the way they look at funding libraries.  It would solve a lot of this.  In the meantime we have to make some of the hard choices.. .  

In other words: Time to sell and shrink the libraries!

Throughout the rest of the meeting Mr. Nachowitz was very firm about the fact that the city was not going to be coming up with any money to obviate the need to sell off the libraries (although he did say the city could make funds available to help facilitate the library sales).

Mr. Nachowitz did come up with other bombshells during the evening about what city and library officials wanted to do to in terms of moving the sale of the library forward at a “fast trot”:

    •    Library officials are committed to inking a deal that hands the library to a developer before Bloomberg leaves office December 31st (Nachowitz: “coming up with a solution to redevelop this branch. . .  identify a development partner and hopefully enter into a contract with a development partner before the end of this administration”).  That means the that inked hand-off would come well before most of the promised public review.  And coming even before that, Nachowitz said that an RFP (Request For Proposals) specifying in detail exactly what the new library was to be like would precede the selection of the “development partner.” (Nachowitz saying the RFP would have “very clear language that the developer has to provide XYZ library.”)

    •    Library officials want to effect a more than 50% shutdown of the library operation almost immediately, come summer.   The BPL would "redeploy" library staff.  Again this would be well before the public could provide any input about whether it wants its library shrunk, hours reduced or the Business and Career library exiled.  The more than 50% shutdown would likely be permanent because the BPL has already announced its intent to shutdown the Business and Career library at Brooklyn Heights.  Doing so now, rather than waiting for public input, is an effective maneuver to banish the constituency that might otherwise advocate for the continued presence of the Business and Career library that the developer apparently doesn’t want in the building.  (Nachowitz said at the Pacific Branch meeting that the BPL was intent on finding out what the real estate market was interested in buying before deciding what specification the BPL would apply to a sale of that building.) 

As for those afterward-ensuing reviews which would essentially be made meaningless: When Mr. Nachowitz was explaining to people that now was not the time to ask questions he was assuring:

One other quick comment. . . Our vision is for this to be sort of a really nitty gritty working group with, you know, our elected officials and stakeholders in the community.  We welcome the public come and sit in on the meetings and understand what is going on.  We want to be as transparent and as up-front about the process and about the future of this building and about the future of library services in this community as we can possibly be.  There will be, as Rob [Rob Perris of community Board 2] can tell you, there will be ample opportunity at community board hearings, the ULURP process, the 34B process and RFP process.  There will be literally dozens and dozens and dozens of community meetings and hours of important testimony from the public.   

To reiterate: Josh Nachowitz wants almost all of that public review to be after a contract has put a developer in charge of the process and after the library is more than half closed and shrunk with the Business and Career library likely exiled and out of the picture.

What was the evening meeting of this "nitty gritty working group" about besides the unveiling of those bombshells?  It was pretty much what Josh Nachowitz wanted it to be about: the expression of frittering concerns about exactly how total the shutdown of the library starting that summer would be, what exact hours would be cut, and exactly how small a temporary replacement library would be when the building was torn down (maybe just 5,000 square feet).

The more than 50% shutdown was being called for because Nachowitz told the group there was unsolvable air conditioning problem.  Could people possibly find solutions to the air conditioning problem?  Mr. Nachowitz was dismissively shooting prospective solutions down like he was skeet shooting.  He was quick on the draw and there was an eerie certainty to his rapid responses delivered with a smile, including his admonition that it would be silly for anyone to raise private money to vanquish the problem.

It should be noted that whenever the libraries want to push a library out the door as a real estate deal they find air conditioning problems a handy complaint.  The reason Donnell Library needed to be closed, sold and shrunk?  An air conditioning problem! Why demolish the historic research book stack system at the Tilden Astor Central Reference Library at 42nd Street?   An air conditioning problem!  Sell the historic Pacific Branch? An air conditioning problem!  Want to sell off a lot of libraries in Brooklyn?  Announce that a lot of them have air conditioning problems and start closing them in the summer!     See: More libraries fall as heat nears 100 degrees, By Mary Frost, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 1, 2012 .
                                       
The BPL hasn’t released any of its bid documents respecting the Brooklyn Heights air conditioning problems, is stonewalling on the release of minutes pertaining to public meetings that relate to the the issue and there is every reason to believe that the cost and difficulty of fixing the air conditioning in the Brooklyn Heights branch is being grossly overstated.

As far as I am concerned if you were in the room that Thursday evening you were in one of three categories (I’ll be silent for now and let others speculate on their own as to who might believe to have been in which): Either you thought that everything going on was totally bogus and were intent on perpetrating the sham. . or you thought that everything going on was totally bogus, were outraged and were trying to figure out how to arrest the scam . . .  Or you really believed that you had been invited in for a convivial game of “dwarf tossing” and therefore thought you needed to do everything you could to see that dwarfs were tossed around with as little bodily injury and as few fatalities as possible.  That way you could be declared a hero for, in theory, minimizing the damage.

As all this sounds rather grim, I should perhaps finish up with some “dwarf tossing” video clips from the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but after having dwelt on this topic, you may not now find these scenes from the fantasy world of Middle Earth so amusing after all.

(Correction appended 04/23/2013: Previously this article stated that the estimation that the city might receive $100 million for the sell-off of the Brooklyn Heights library site was put out by BPL CEO Linda Johnson.  That estimation was put out by a real estate broker, not Linda Johnson herself, in an article focusing on arguments Johnson was making that the sale was a good thing: Brooklyn Public Library CEO Linda Johnson says downsized Brooklyn Heights branch will silence critics.)

Gimli - Toss me! Aragorn gives Gimli a bit of help!



Nobody Tosses A Dwarf!



Gimli toss

Bloomberg’s Increasing Annual Wealth: 1996 to 2013, Plus Updates On His Annual “Charitable” Giving

How much will Bloomberg’s wealth continue to go up?  Bloomberg looks skyward.. . . .The image above is from the November 1, 2012 press conference when, with multiple counties in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut declared disaster areas due to Superstorm Hurricane Sandy, Bloomberg couldn't have looked more bored or been more disrespectful to FEMA’s Secretary Napolitano, who was in New York to provide help.  See: Friday, November 2, 2012, Despite Expected Kudos, Bloomberg Tires of Hurricane Relief Administration Role: That, Or He Tremendously Disrespects Homeland Secretary Janet Napolitano.  Video is available on Youtube.

Forbes has just come out with its new individual wealth calculations informing us that Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s wealth has again escalated, this time to $27 billion.  Last time the escalation, from $19.5 to $25 billion, was just a bit more startling.  That 28% jump in Bloomberg's wealth in 2012 was ascribed to Forbes estimating "the growth of the mayor’s fortune based on a rise in revenue at Bloomberg L.P.", Bloomberg L.P. being the mayor's company that does business with virtually every significant business that interacts with the city in any way, important or otherwise.

It will be interesting to see what happens to the escalation of Bloomberg's wealth as his final term winds up and he then leaves office.  He is now a lame duck but he is still intent on overseeing the significant defunding, shrinking and ensuring the sell-off of real estate and libraries from the city library system before he leaves office, December 31, 2013:  See: Sunday, March 3, 2013, The Petition To Save The Libraries Is Working: Confirming Petition Points BPL Head Linda Johnson, Library Officials Trip Up Defending Plans.

Here is an update how astoundingly Bloomberg's wealth has increased every year, especially since taking an interest in, and entering, politics.  It is very hard to find others with similar wealth trajectories, although David H. Koch is another New Yorker who has been involved in politics who has also seen significant wealth increases at the same time.  See the update below (Forbes publishes figures in September and again in February):

1996 - $1 billion
1997 - $1.3 billion
1998 - $2 billion
1999- $2.5 billion
2000- $4 billion
2001- $4 billion
2002- $4.8 billion
2003- $4.9 Billion
2004- $5 Billion
2005- $5.1 Billion
2006- $5.3 Billion
2007- $11.5 billion
2008- $20 billion
2009- $16 billion (interim March figure)*
2009- $17.5 billion (A year of $105 million in direct campaign expenditures, plus. .)**
2010- $18.0 billion (Bloomberg surpassed by David H. Koch)
2011- $19.5 billion
2012- $25 billion
2013- $27 billion

 * For more on how Bloomberg's wealth declined (because he didn't see the financial crisis coming?- And how the press missed it) see: Bloomberg Update: Fire and Ice (Sunday, April 12, 2009)

** Respecting this: Direct campaign expenditures were about $105 million. Bloomberg, in his three bids for mayor, easily burned through more than $250 million in direct campaign expenditures. Taking into account funds Bloomberg spent indirectly for political purposes you get into billion dollar figures.

*** Bloomberg was still reported to be New York City's richest New Yorker in March of 2010 but in September 2010 was surpassed by David H. Koch, one of the two equally wealthy brothers providing substantial funding to the Tea Party. It is to be observed with some interest that Bloomberg's accretion of wealth substantially accelerated when Bloomberg got involved in politics. In August of 2010 people began writing about how David Koch and his brother Charles were funding the Tea Party, which emerged starting in the beginning of 2009 (i.e. just weeks after Obama’s January 2009 inauguration.) Looks as if it can be very good for one’s financial status to get involved in politics! (Though to be fair the Kochs were involved in politics before the advent of the Tea Party.) The brothers' privately-owned Koch Industries is a diversified conglomerate that had its origins in crude oil refining and still has substantial investment in pipelines and refineries. Consequently, Koch Industries has a history of accidents, spills and pollution of the environment.

Noticing New York previously published and commented on running tallies of the mayor's escalating wealth.  See:  Sunday, October 16, 2011, Bloomberg’s Increasing Annual Wealth: 1996 to 2011, Tuesday, February 3, 2009, Bloomberg’s Increasing Annual Wealth: 1996 to 2008, and Friday, January 25, 2013, Bloomberg’s Increasing Annual Wealth: 1996 to 2012 Plus Updates On His Annual “Charitable” Giving.  (This article is essentially an updating rewrite of that last article.)

Noticing New York has also reported on the history of the mayor's "charitable" giving, which is important because the mayor is at the very top of the list of such spenders in this country.  It also seems like a good time to again provide updated figures in this regard.  The 2012 calendar year has closed, tax returns are due and new lists and information about what people have given and deducted will also be published soon.  The last Noticing New York article noting the update available respecting Bloomberg's $350 million beginning-of-the-year donation Bloomberg gave to his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University is: Wednesday, January 30, 2013, Latest (Early) Update On Bloomberg’s “Charitable” Giving- A Preview Of 2013? (Added to Info For Years 1997 to 2011).  With an infusion of that kind of money into New York City's libraries, the pretextual rationale for selling libraries to real estate developers would disappear.

Below in chart form is updated information about Bloomberg’s level of giving and the years of associated Bloomberg political campaigns. 

$26.6 million:- Bloomberg’s charitable gifts in 1997 (when he distributed to 433 groups). Handouts have increased every year since - Press mentions of Bloomberg philanthropy begin this year 
$45 million:- Bloomberg’s charitable gifts in 1998 - Year Bloomberg started talking publicly about running for mayor 
$47 million:- Bloomberg’s charitable gifts in 1999 
$100.5 million:- Bloomberg’s charitable gifts in 2000 (579 organizations)- Year before first mayoral election campaign 
$122.5 million:- Bloomberg’s charitable gifts in 2001 (540 groups) Was elected mayor in November 
$130.9 million:- Bloomberg’s charitable gifts in 2002 (655 groups) Became mayor 
$135.6 million:- Bloomberg’s charitable gifts in 2003 (653 groups) 
$138/139.9 million*:- Bloomberg’s charitable gifts in 2004 (843 groups) 
$143.9 million:- Bloomberg’s charitable gifts in 2005 (987 groups)- Second campaign for mayor in connection with the 2005 election 
$165.3 million:- Bloomberg’s charitable gifts in 2006. (1,077 groups) 
$205 million:- Bloomberg’s charitable gifts in 2007.- The year he started to run for president.- The year he left the Republican party 
$235 million:- Bloomberg’s charitable gifts in 2008 (1,221 recipient groups)- The year that Bloomberg started running for his third term as mayor and overthrew the city’s term limits restrictions.
 $254 million:- Bloomberg’s charitable gifts in 2009 (1,300 organizations).  2009 was the year that Bloomberg was elected in November to his third term as New York Mayor after spending approximately $105 million in acknowledged direct spending on his campaign (many multiples of what his challenger could raise from the public) and, in addition, Bloomberg's political aides (also holding public posts) get fabulously huge bonuses for campaign work.
 $279.18 million:- Bloomberg’s charitable gifts in 2010 - Bloomberg ranked the #2 American "giver", "giving" to "arts, human services, public affairs, and other groups".  2010 was the year that Bloomberg shifted his charitable spending,which had always concentrated on New York City recipients, to focusing on recipients connected to issues of national significance.
 $311.3 million:- Bloomberg’s charitable gifts in 2011 - Bloomberg ranked the #5 American "giver," "giving" to "1,185 arts, human-services, public-affairs, and other groups".

Early available figures coming out for 2012 giving don’t yet mention a figure for Bloomberg or where he will be in the rankings.

 $350 million (and counting):-  Bloomberg’s charitable gifts in 2013.

* (difference between Times and Chronicle of Philanthropy figures)

(Figures for calendar years1997 through 2008 available from:

•     the Chronicle of Philanthropy
•     Mayor's $weet Charity, by David Seifman, January 27, 2009
•     Bloomberg’s Gifts to Charity Exceeded $165 Million in 2006, by Diane Cardwell, September 17, 2007
•     Nearly 1,000 Groups Gain From Bloomberg’s Largess, by Sewell Chan, October 18, 2006
•     2003 tax year? For Bloomberg, 'Rich' Is Just Too Weak an Adjective, By Leslie Eaton, July 3, 2004.
•     In 2002, Bloomberg Lost a Bit (for Him) and Gave a Lot, by David Johnston (Correction: David Cay Johnston), June 14, 2003)

The 1997 through 2008 figures were originally consolidated to go along with this Noticing New York article about Bloomberg's "charitable" giving: The Good News IS the Bad News: Thanks A lot for Mayor Bloomberg’s “Charity” (Monday, February 2, 2009). For more on what those numbers mean in context click to read the article.

It is important to keep track of Bloomberg's wealth and "charitable" spending because Bloomberg is a public official and the earning of his wealth is subject to many conflict of interest concerns.  At the same time, cycling around, that wealth is deployed for political purposes that include the "charitable" spending above.  The charitable spending above does not reflect the non-tax-deductable augmenting amounts the Bloomberg donates to political campaigns and causes.

The news of what Mayor Bloomberg was `donating to charity' used to be big news in the local New York City press and it was clear that Bloomberg was pressing to get that information out to local reporters as part of his image.  Since 2009, the year that Noticing New York published a chart of Bloomberg's donations, that information has not been as readily available in the local press.  As you will note from the links for calendar years 2009, 2010 and 2011 above, it is still available.  Previously, news of exactly what Bloomberg was "giving" to charity would surface in news, usually reported in May, about Bloomberg's tax returns.

I am not sure whether there has actually been a change in what gets revealed to New York reporters at tax return time in terms of his business dealings or “charitable” contributions, but Bloomberg does not provide his actual tax returns for review by the public.  Instead he allows reporters to come and view redacted tax information for less than three hours.  No copying is permitted.

In early 2010 a New York Times story observed that the mayor doesn’t like talking about his money, although he “swells with evident pride at how his charitable contributions, topping more than $200 million a year [much closer to already topping $300 million a year by then], have helped to boost the arts in New York, and finance antismoking and traffic safety endeavors in poor countries.”  See: February 22, 2010, Bloomberg Doesn’t Want to Talk About His Money, by David W. Chen.

2010 was also the year that the mayor was taken to task in the spring because a 2009 tax return for one of his private foundations (which was subject to disclosure) showed that Bloomberg had offshore investments.  See: The Mayor's Money: Bloomberg Pressed on Offshore Investments, Saturday, April 24, 2010, by Bob Hennelly.  For more discussion of this, together with information about how Bloomberg was restructuring his giving patterns in 2010, redirecting it to national charities, and also information about the new board with political overtones Bloomberg set up headed by his First Deputy Mayor and chief political strategist, Patricia Harris, see: Monday, May 24, 2010, Looking a Gift Horse in the Mouth? An Examination of Brooklyn Bridge Park in Terms of the Politics of Development, Part I.

For a long time and until just recently, Bloomberg was not only the mayor but also the city's richest individual (now he is only the second richest), his wealth having skyrocketed after he announced his interest in politics. For more about the unprecedented peculiarity of that and Bloomberg's conflicts of interest as mayor while his wealth accumulated see: Thursday, October 22, 2009, This Is Rich! Looks Like Bloomberg is Making History and Sunday, November 1, 2009 Bloomberg vs. Thomson (54% to 29%?): It’s Not What You Think. (For Instance the “P” is Missing and What Might “P” Stand For?). The image above is from, and explained in, those posts.

For an older story about how the media is not keeping up with the story of Bloomberg's wealth, the conflicts of interests involved in where it comes from and his so-called "charitable" giving see: No Real Debate About It: Press Remains Way Off Track in Presupposing Bloomberg’s “Charity” (Friday, October 2, 2009)
For Noticing New York's remarks on Bloomberg's term limits extension see: Challenging Bloomberg Unlimited (Sunday, October 18, 2009)

The Occupy Wall Street protesters whom Bloomberg evicted from Zucotti Park didn't have a very good relationship with the mayor.  Many of the placards on display when you visited the protest were critical of Bloomberg, including the one below that suggested that Bloomberg be spoken to "about the looting." Conversely, Bloomberg was critical about what the protesters have to say.  It hardly seems as if much time has gone by since the mayor's November 2011 eviction of the protestors from Zucotti Park, but if the protestors ever retake the space their signs will need to be updated. With Bloomberg's wealth last estimated at $25 billion the sign below from that time putting his wealth at a mere $18 billion is sorely out of date.

Above, just one of the many now very outdated  Occupy Wall Street placards addressing the subject of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's wealth.

I thought it might also be useful to provide Bloomberg's wealth and "Charitable" giving information in another form, so below is a consolidated chart that shows both:

The Petition To Save The Libraries Is Working: Confirming Petition Points BPL Head Linda Johnson, Library Officials Trip Up Defending Plans

What could Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein have to do with the plan of the trustees of the Brooklyn Public Library to sell off and shrink libraries, the Brooklyn Heights Library and others, in highly finagled real estate deals benefitting developers?  Read on.

The petition seems to be working.

The petition I am referring to is the Citizens Defending Libraries petition: Save New York City Libraries From Bloomberg Developer Destruction, with which I am involved, now with about 7,900 signatures.  It protests how New York City libraries are being sold and underfunded and the city’s library system shrunk because the system has now shifted to a new focus: the creation of real estate deals for developers.

Why do I think the petition is working?  Because the Daily News has been covering the story and the head of the Brooklyn Public Library, Linda Johnson, and library officials are tripping up defending their plans.  The more public statements they put out there the more they succeed in confirming major points made in the petition and which have also been reported in articles appearing here in Noticing New York.

The Daily News ran the first library article in a recent series of library shrinkage articles.  It focused on the petition and one of its objections, the shrinking of the Brooklyn Heights library (where Brooklyn Heights meets downtown Brooklyn at 280 Cadman Plaza) on Sunday, February 17, 2013: Coming to Brooklyn Heights: the incredible shrinking library, patrons and residents charge-  Controversial plan to sell library building to private developer who will build apartment tower over it, by Lore Croghan.   At that time, as the article reports, the petition had about 900 signatures.  My wife Carolyn and I both appeared in the article and accompanying pictures as proponents of the petition.

That first Daily New story explained how the Brooklyn Heights library is being shrunk. The shrinking involves a proposed deal to turn the library property over to a developer (very possibly Forest City Ratner) to build a very tall tower that is supposed to have a much smaller library in it when completed.  The current Brooklyn Heights library is actually two libraries functioning on an integrated basis. One of them is the neighborhood’s branch library.  The plan includes booting the other, the Business and Career library, out of its traditional Downtown Brooklyn central business district location, at the hub of transportation and adjacent to borough universities.  To the questionable extent that the booted-out library continues to exist afterwards it will be jammed into the more remote main branch library in Prospect Heights near the park, making that library effectively smaller.

The current Brooklyn Heights library is 62,000 square feet.  The replacement is being spoken of as being a projected 15,000 to 16,000 square feet.  Library officials assert that the plan would in essence cut the size of the library only in half because the library contains space not currently directly accessed by the public and space they say the library has not chosen to fully utilize (there is space, not opened to the public that was originally a bomb shelter.)

The administration officials for the library have acknowledged that the Business and Career library ought to be keeping longer hours as it and other libraries did in the past (and still ought to be doing).  According to information from those officials, the planned exile of the Business library would facilitate having relatively shorter hours at the branch library remaining afterwards in Brooklyn Heights.  They have chosen to express this as a positive, saying that the Business and Career library might go back to relatively longer hours after it is moved.

We told the Daily News reporter that both the petition and the problem of the shrinkage of the library system and sell-off of libraries to developers was city-wide, not confined to Brooklyn Heights.  That was not the story the reporter wanted to cover at that time.  There will be more about how the Daily News is reporting that much bigger story a little later in this article.

The next article in the recent Daily News series of library articles ran eight days later when the petition signatures had climbed by may thousands.  Library CEO Linda Johnson, having her say, defended the shrinkage plan, telling the Daily News that in about four years (the time they are perhaps optimistically estimating it will take to provide a new library):

“we hope people’s objections are going to disappear when they have a better experience” in the new library.

(See: Brooklyn Public Library CEO Linda Johnson says downsized Brooklyn Heights branch will silence critics - Part of plan announced last month to sell the building to a private developer who will tear down the 50-year-old facility and construct an apartment tower with library branch inside, by Lore Croghan, Monday, February 25, 2013)

Johnson depicted her envisioned future as if it was a done deal, furnishing details of the design:

 . . a light-filled facility full of patron-pleasing technology. .

The new Heights library will be an open space with few walls, Johnson said, describing “space that’s flexible to accommodate new technology we don’t even know about.”

It will have space for community gatherings, spots where patrons can work together — and room for the branch’s book, DVD and film collections.

The next day the Daily News ran an article about how, starting in just months, there will be a more than 50% shutdown of the library, cutting its hours down by more than half in response to what officials cite as supposedly insurmountable air conditioning problems.  See: Brooklyn Heights Library patrons are going to be fired up over cuts in hours this summer: branch expects to be open only half-time because of air-conditioning troubles–  Will further inflame residents who are already angry about Brooklyn Public Library's plan to sell off the valuable Court St. site to a private developer, who would build an apartment tower that includes reduced-size library, by Lore Croghan, Tuesday, February 26, 2013, 8:12 PM

The new library hours would be 8:00 AM to 1:00 PM and the latest word from the library officials is that the library would no longer be open Saturdays.  Not mentioned in the article is that the library will “redeploy” the library’s staff elsewhere.  Would the library be reopened after the summer?  With the staff redeployed in the shutdown and library officials announcing their plan to ink a deal handing the library off to a developer before December 31, 2013 (the last day of Mayor Bloomberg’s term) that is an unlikely assumption.  After the Donnell Library in Manhattan (closed for sale and 50% shrinkage in 2008) sat idle for years local residents asked City Council for a law to compel its reopening.  It never happened.  Open libraries generate constituencies that tend to get in the way of furthering real estate sell-offs.  (During the Brooklyn Heights branch multi-year closure there would be a really small temporary replacement of perhaps 5,000 square feet.)

What are library officials telling the public?  Visitors to the Brooklyn Heights branch are getting a handout that, despite Johnson’s descriptions of what she knows the new library will look like, says:

Selling the Brooklyn heights branch will involve a rigorous public review and review by our local elected officials.  In 2013, BPL staff will present our vision for the branch to the community at community board meetings and other forums.  We expect to begin the review and development process this year.  It is anticipated that the review and approval will take approximately two years, during which time the branch will remain open at its current location.  BPL is committed to maintaining service in Brooklyn Heights throughout this period and will provide a temporary service location for the duration of the construction period.

(emphasis supplied by the BPL)

BPL handout, click to enlarge

Not communicated is that because library officials say they want to ink the deal that hands the library to a developer before Bloomberg leaves office December 31st, that inked hand-off would come well before those two years of promised review.  It doesn't say that a more than 50% shutdown of the library operation would be in place almost immediately, well before the public could provide any input about whether it wants its library shrunk, hours reduced or the Business and Career library exiled.

The handout also notes that the shrinkage and replacement of the library will involve a cost to the library that is unspecified but is cheerfully characterized as “little.”  One wonders whether that “little” cost would be less than the cost of repairing the air conditioning.

That brings us to a consideration of the air conditioning costs that have been announced.  The ostensible reason the BPL now wants to sell the library is because of the theoretically prohibitive cost of repairing the air conditioning system and the reason they say they have to sell it now while Bloomberg is in office is because of the impossibility of coming up with any temporary air conditioning solutions so that things won’t have to be rushed along as if there was an emergency.  The two-story building (built in 1963) including its HVAC system providing the air conditioning was renovated just twenty years ago.  The air conditioning costs promulgated by the library started in the $700,000 to $750,000 range, climbed to $3 million as they were about to roll out the real estate deal and then went to $3.5 million (They have been misreported by the Brooklyn Paper as $9 million). I invite you to talk to your own construction friends and advisors and decide where you think these estimated costs lie on the spectrum between “highly suspect” and “totally absurd.”

At a meeting the other night the library’s spokesperson was very firm that nobody should think about raising money for the repairs (Bloomberg might be quite chagrined if someone did), just as firm about how there was no solution for summer climate control (visiting PC Richards for a few window units or ceiling fans, etc.).

October 2011 Daily News article about plans to sell libraries

So how do these inconsistent stories fit in with the larger narrative?  To decide that it is valuable to go back in time and look at an interview the BPL’s Linda Johnson did in 2011 when she visited the Daily News editorial board to sell them on the idea of library sales: Brooklyn Public Library head Linda Johnson seeking to sell some property to raise money for repairs, by Erin Durkin, Sunday, October 16, 2011.  That interview, particularly in view of more recently unfolding events, highlights and confirms the points made in the petition and previous Noticing New York Articles. 

Confirmation that the focus is on real estate deals, the juiciest ones first

Johnson told the Daily News that her focus was on “certain pieces of real estate we have that are very valuable.”  Johnson did not then identify that the Brooklyn Heights branch or the Pacific branch (both adjacent to Forest City Ratner properties) were two of the “certain pieces of real estate” she was looking at.  In fact, the library has not yet revealed what other libraries are next in line for such treatment even though I’ve personally had some of the other parcels that are being looked at by the system identified to me by the development community.

Confirmation that the Brooklyn Heights library was not the one single library that Bloomberg and library officials are looking at selling off.

At the recent meeting when the plan to sell the Brooklyn Heights library was first publicly described, the spokesperson for the library denied that the sale was part of an overall plan involving selling more libraries.  It was asserted that it was “just this library.”  That’s obviously not so and didn’t acknowledge that the spokesperson was also dealing with the press about the sale of the nearby Pacific branch.  (The BPL’s strategic plan formally states that all the system’s real estate is in play.)  At the same time the front of the New York Times that week had the Michael Kimmelman article’s information about the sell-off and contraction of the most important libraries in Manhattan.

Confirmation that when the library is sold the money doesn’t go to the library, but to the city.

The article made clear Johnson knew that:

the city owns the branch buildings - and under current rules any money garnered from selling them would go to the city's general fund, and the library wouldn't see a dime.

It said only that Johnson was “trying to work out a deal with Bloomberg administration officials” whereby the library could get some money upon such sales.  Unfortunately, as former City Parks Commissioner Adriane Benepe made clear when speaking of such deals in the context of parks, such deals are impossible to make in any true meaningful way because money is fungible.  In fact, such a deal has never been reached.

Without a basis to believe that money would go to the library as the result of such a sale and without knowing how much money that might be, it is impossible to do any sort of analysis about why or whether such a sale would be good for the library system.  And yet, without having done any such analysis, Johnson has now decided to sell the library.  Ergo, in a failure of trust, the only goal in mind in making this decision is the real estate deal being created.

Confirmation that what we are looking at is city-wide.

If one needed confirmation that what is being done is being looked at as a city-wide strategy, proof that goes beyond the similarities between what is being pushed in Brooklyn Heights (and with Pacific Street) and what is happening with Manhattan’s libaries, Donnell, the three other libraries involved in the Central Library plan (involving the irrevocable destruction of the 42nd Street library as a proper research library), there is this: Johnson said her sales “could be a model for the city's other library systems.” 

Confirmation that the decision to sell the Brooklyn Heights library was in the works before the air conditioning problems manifested themselves.

One very interesting thing about Linda Johnson's interview with the Daily News editorial board about how she expected to sell “certain pieces of real estate we have that are very valuable” is that it was in October of 2011 (the article is dated October 16, 2011).  The following summer was when the library discovered it had air conditioner problems.  See: Brooklyn Heights Library Admits AC System Is Kaput, by Chuck Taylor on July 18, 2012.  Back then they weren’t saying the problems could be quickly solved or that temporary solutions would be worthless.

Confirmation that we need to be worried about board trustee mind-set and motivations.

Johnson shared with the Daily News editorial board that she had it in mid to “build a better board” and that her idea of building a better board would be to put Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein on the board.  (From what she says, she apparently hobnobs a bit with him.)

Mr. Blankfein would, for two reasons, be an absolutely perfect pick if the purpose to find board members to get behind real estate deals that shrink libraries while craftily conferring more benefits upon the wealthy and connected. First, Mr. Blankfein’s Goldman Sachs took advantage of special relationships and maneuvering to procure unique real estate benefits, design overrides and subsidies for its new corporate headquarters in Battery Park City.  That was written about here in Noticing New York: Monday, February 23, 2009, Un-funny Valentines Arriving Late: Your Community Interests at Heart.  Second, Mr. Blankfein is a proponent of the notion that the public needs to lower its expectations about entitlements that he is firm“they're not going to get.”


   


Both of these things about Mr. Blankfein were made very clear in a recent Bill Moyers essay spotlighting Mr. Blankfein: Bill Moyers Essay: The ‘Crony Capitalist Blowout’, January 11, 2013, explaining “how last week’s fiscal cliff deal gave tens of billions in tax breaks to Wall Street and corporations — what even the Wall Street Journal calls a “crony capitalist blowout” and beginning with Moyers talking about the “extraordinary rise in wealth and power of the very rich during this era of unregulated greed.”

The Moyers essay is about how a larding of special corporate tax breaks and loopholes was pushed through as part of the recent fiscal cliff negotiation and settlement, something that even the Wall Street Journal was appalled by, hence that paper’s application of the “crony capitalist blowout” phrase. Blankfein’s Goldman Sachs provided one of the very worst examples.

“You're going to have to. . lower people's expectations, the entitlements and what people think that they're going to get.  Because they're not going to get it.”  (Libraries?) From the CBS interview

Here is a transcript of part of the Moyers essay that deals with Blankfein which included a clip of CBS newsman Scoot Pelley interviewing Blankfein.

    Moyers: CEOs, lobbyists were tripping over themselves as they traipsed up and down Pennsylvania Avenue between Congress and the White House privately protecting their interest as they publicly urged austerity on everybody else.  Here's Lloyd Blankfein, CEO and chair of the global investment giant Goldman Sachs when asked by CBS news Scott Pelley about how he would reduce the federal deficit:

    (Beginning of clip)

    Blankfein: You're going to have to, undoubtably, do something to lower people’s expectations, the entitlements and what people think that they're going to get.  Because they're not going to get it. 

    Pelley: Social Security Medicare, medicaid?

    Blankfein; Some things. You know you can go back and look at the history of these things.  And Social Security wasn't devised to be a system that supported you for a 30 year retirement after a 25 year career.  Entitlements have to be slowed down and contained.

    Pelly: Because we can't afford them, going forward?

    Blankfein: Because we can't afford them!

    (End of clip)

    Moyers: Ah yes, but Goldman makes sure their entitlements aren't touched. 

Moyers then explained a brand-new chapter concerning the Goldman Sachs headquarters shenanigans I hadn’t caught up with.  After 9/11, Goldman used special connections to get for their headquarters tax-exempt Liberty Bonds intended to help with the city's recovery (that I knew).  During the fiscal cliff negotiations Goldman's lobbying got these benefits specially extended.  (I hadn’t heard about this and probably few others have either.)  

Goldman Sachs building under construction

So, on two different scores Blankfein is absolutely the most perfect choice as the foxiest guy to guard the hen house: The engineering of tricky real estates deals for the rich and well connected, and simultaneously telling the public they are going to have to expect and get less.

Are books getting the heave-ho with a “starbuckified” digitalization of the libraries?

Some are concerned that Johnson’s vision of the libraries is to make them all look like Starbucks.  She is prone to comparing the library to Starbucks and did so In the 2011 Daily News article as she has in other interviews.   This is not to say that digitalization is, itself, bad: I often buy digital books.  If the book is important book, I often also buy a physical copy of book at the same time, finding it efficient to go back and forth between them for different purposes.  This is what the Daily News article documented about Johnson respecting her views:

Johnson envisions more big changes,  and concedes that not everyone in the BPL family is thrilled about it.

"When I talk about what the library's going to look like in five or ten years, and talk about the fact that books become less and less a critical part of the mission - at least traditional hard-copy books - I can see that (librarians) are crestfallen," she said. "And it makes me sad too, because I love a book as much as anybody does.

"The fact is, now we're competing with Barnes & Noble and Starbucks," she said.

Confirming top-down planning for BPL system changes.

A key issue about the plans to remake the libraries as real estate deals concerns the observation that these plans and new regimes are being imposed top down based simply on what the Linda Johnsons and Lloyd Blankfeins of the world believe is best for the public.  That we are not, as Jane Jacobs would suggest, is allowing for common sense to filter up from the people actually using the services.  This was problem when Donnell Library was closed in 2008.  It is a problem with the secretively produced Central Library plan in Manhattan.  Listen to the users?  Here is what Johnson offers:

“We need to be using technology just a little bit ahead of where the customers are so we can actually be helpful, instead of letting them drag us where they want to go.”

So does Johnson already know what the new much smaller Brooklyn Heights library is going to look like? Is she already able to confidently describe it because it is already designed and being imposed from the top?  Does that mean that during the “approximately two years” of upcoming “review and approval” that the library assures that public should expect (most of which the library officials want to have occur after handing off the property to a developer that will possibly/likely include Forest City Ratner) the library officials won't actually be listening to the public because they will already be dedicated to an existing plan, unwilling for the public to “drag us where they want to go.”

Why do I say the petition is working?  Because it is flushing these issues out while library officials defending the plan fall over themselves with mistakes and obvious inconsistencies, each making it more and more clear that what they are doing was never intended to be in the public’s interest.  (Click to sign: Save New York City Libraries From Bloomberg Developer Destruction.)