7 OctOber 9 - 15, 2025 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents was the first week of the new fiscal year, which means it’s the first week Marilla Street began work with the biggest budget it’s ever seen, even though many depart- ments are squeezed tighter than ever be- fore, including the library system. Our credit rating outlook has been down- graded, and two-thirds of the city’s fund- ing this year will be put towards the police and fire departments, leaving other city services on the chopping block. The Skillman Southwestern Branch Li- brary closed over recently after the city coun- cil debated a handful of amendments that would have saved or shuttered it. Library leaders have already been informed that, in fiscal year 2027, approximately $2.6 million in additional savings needs to be found, meaning more branches are likely to close. “As we started to look at the budget and the amounts of money that we need to save in FY27, there are only two ways to save that amount of money. That’s either to reduce hours and days, like we have done eight times in the past 15 years, or we could take another approach,” said Manya Shorr, director of the Dallas Public Library. “Unfortunately, the fa- cilities plan just wasn’t as helpful for that de- velopment as I would have hoped it would be.” “It was very clear very quickly, we either need a doubled budget, or we need fewer lo- cations,” she added. The first discussions about FY27’s budget are expected to begin in December, leaving li- brary leaders with only a few months to de- termine which additional branches should close. The criteria for that decision have yet to be established, Shorr said, and community input will be solicited. However, she hopes to engage in a more “robust” conversation than “we don’t want our library to close.” “My desire is not to close libraries, no li- brary director wants to do that,” she said. “At the end of the day, what we’re looking for here is stability with some strategy and intention.” Shorr, who was announced for the di- rector role in June after running the Fort Worth Public Library system, said she was “shocked” to start in her role and realize the budget pressures that DPL has been “quietly” experiencing for years. The library budget peaked at $36 mil- lion in the 2007-2008 budget; adjusted for inflation, that would be around $50 mil- lion today, and the system comprised 26 facilities. This year, DPL’s 30 facilities were given $43 million in the budget. In comparison, Austin allocates $70 million annually to its library system, and San An- tonio’s library budget is nearly $60 mil- lion. Shorr believes the library system’s path forward is moving towards a “regional model.” In Tuesday evening’s municipal li- brary board meeting, she explained that in the coming months, library leaders will identify four library branches around the city that will transition to “regionals”: seven- day-a-week facilities with extended hours. The Vickery Park Branch Library already follows this model, so DPL will sponsor a to- tal of five regional branches. “If we double down on these regional li- braries, we’ll be open around the city at key locations when our community needs us, which is something that we’re not able to achieve right now,” Shorr said. According to Shorr, the 20-year facilities plan, which was put together over the course of a year by the consulting firm Group 4 Architecture, was primarily paid for by the Friends of the Dallas Public Li- brary, not taxpayers. She hopes the docu- ment doesn’t end up totally “trashed,” even if the guidance outlined isn’t exactly the path the library system now seems to be on. The plan was useful, she added, during last year’s city bond conversation. The 2024 bond earmarked $43.5 million for the Park Forest and North Oak Cliff Branch Li- braries, and in Tuesday’s meeting, Shorr said the City Council’s Quality of Life com- mittee will begin the process of finalizing those bond dollar plans later this month. The document also offers a comprehensive overview of the sorts of facility mainte- nance that will be needed in the coming de- cades — that type of upkeep has historically fallen into the city’s blind spot. “It feels a bit incomplete rather than something we won’t use altogether,” Shorr said. “I think there was a missed opportu- nity to talk about alternative service mod- els, to really look at the landscape of the city, and to talk about where there may be gaps.” Dylan Hollingsworth Library closures will save the city hundreds of thousands of dollars each year.
