Major-league baseball training camps are open and tax-filing season is in full swing – so it’s time again for the annual kabuki dance over . . . funding for city libraries.
In tight times, mayors typically propose trimming library budgets, full in the knowledge that the drunken sailors on the City Council will respond with shrieks of outrage and order that the cuts be restored – and then some.
It’s a harmless enough exercise: The libraries are always made whole, and the council members get to feel useful.
This year, Mayor Mike has proposed a 7 percent cut for libraries – and it would be no tragedy if that stood.
Anyone who doubts it should peruse Chuck Bennett’s eye-opening report in yesterday’s Post.
Maybe even memorize it.
The piece lends to the yearly funding fight some needed perspective about just where library dollars really go – such as: to Priscilla Southon, who gets a whopping $188,846 a year and doesn’t even work at the city libraries.
Southon retired last year as a senior VP for human resources in the New York Public Library system – thereby becoming New York’s seventh-highest-grossing state pensioner.
Mary Conwell, a retired director of branches, gets $184,498 a year – the ninth-fattest pension from the state.
Yes, Southon, Conwell and the other 1,126 library retirees now collecting a total $20.6 million a year put in their time – some 40 years, in Southon’s case.
It’s also true that pension payments don’t come directly from the city’s roughly $300 million in library subsidies.
But library money is fungible.
And such huge payouts sure make you wonder: What other budget outrages lie hidden between the stacks?
Southon, Conwell & Co. may have been good workers, but their pensions are off the charts – almost literally: As Bennett notes, only doctors and lawyers get higher pensions from the state.
No doubt, council members will soon be bleating about “how crucial libraries are,” as one put it during last year’s fight.
Yada yada.
There’s still a whole lot of fat to be trimmed.
You can make book on that.