Hundreds urge Pleasanton council to spare library as budget cuts loom

Hundreds of residents packed the Pleasanton City Council chamber May 6 to urge the council to preserve library hours and staff as part of a wider discussion about proposed budget reductions.

Janette Moore, a longtime library patron, told the council that the Pleasanton Library is where her children learned to read and where many teens study late into the evening. “If the library closes at 7 where are those 100-plus kids going to go?” she said, describing a petition with more than 1,300 signatures opposing reduced hours.

The public comments — which included teachers, volunteers, students and senior-center advocates — focused on three arguments: the library’s high circulation and per-capita visit rate, the loss of staffing expertise and programming if pages and assistants are cut, and the outsized impact on students who rely on evening and Sunday hours for study. Mary Velisano, who identified herself as a retired nurse and a library page, described shelving and “shelf-reading” as a skilled job and warned that replacing trained pages with volunteers would degrade service.

Mayor Balch and staff reminded the public that the full budget is not on tonight’s agenda; the council will review the complete budget at a May 20 meeting and is scheduled to adopt it June 17. City staff said the current proposal would cut roughly $830,000 in year one and $940,000 in year two from the library and recreation budget in the version discussed at an April workshop.

City Library Department staff explained that volunteers supplement about 13 full-time equivalent positions across departments and that certain services — such as summer reading advocates and ESL literacy programs — rely on volunteer coordination. Staff also said existing shared-catalog programs (Link Plus) and digital holdings would continue but that the proposed materials budget was set at roughly 50% of historical purchasing levels in the proposal.

Students and residents warned of concrete consequences: reduced study time for AP students, fewer opportunities for older adults to access technology and services, and diminished English-language learning programs. Siobhan Bunel, a high school senior, said the library “is the beating heart of our community” and pleaded, “Let’s not close the doors on dreams.”

Councilmembers acknowledged the public testimony and the political difficulty of rebalancing the budget. Mayor Balch and staff said they would continue outreach and noted the May 20 budget hearing; Council Member Ta asked staff to return with alternatives that could protect core library services while meeting fiscal constraints.

The council did not take further action on the budget at the May 6 meeting; the item will return for formal consideration as part of the May 20 budget session.

The next procedural step: the council will review the full budget on May 20 and consider adoption on June 17.