Legalectric

Tonight on the City Council agenda is a proclamation of “National Library Week.”

Something to think about… in light of our Red Wing Public Library...

Last week, March 20, to be precise, when I was posting all those )#$(#(*@($)%$# “Presidential Actions” and Executive Orders, I’d put up a post on our Red Wing Convo regarding our Library, wondering if, like the City, the Red Wing Public Library receives federal funding.

Here’s the link to the Executive Order that caught my attention (I have all of them listed here Tracking “Presidential Actions” and Executive Orders as of 3/19 — if the link doesn’t work, at https://legalectric.org/tracking-presidential-actions/):

Continuing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy  EO 14238  March 14, 2025

And the list of affected entities (FYI, the US Agency for Global Media has already silenced the Voice of America!):

Seeing that in the Executive Order, I’d asked about federal funding of our Library (as I did about federal funding for the City, no response yet) when I’d posted on Red Wing Convo. No one knew anything about it, though there was support for the Library, and also some goofy posts showing abject ignorance of the activities of DOGE.

It took a while, but today I received a response from our Library Director:

Our libraries are a crucial part of our social fabric. Libraries provide services far beyond when I got my first library card at least 65 years ago when my mother would haul me to the Linden Hills Library and fill the back seat with books (the library encouraged my reading, unlike the school, which tried to limit me to “children’s” books, way beneath my reading level).

Libraries are a social hub, providing reading programs for kids, public meeting rooms and conference rooms, a polling place, computer access, copies, newspaper archives, maps, magazines, ebooks on Libby, reference materials, ordering materials from other libraries… what am I forgetting??? Loss of library funding means that the dollars must be made up from somewhere or services suffer. I know I’d spoken about the importance of library funding during budget time, and the City didn’t even fund the additional staff time requested! That’s as absurd as not funding the full $10,000 for the homeless while leasing airport hangars for annual rates of just a few hundred dollars.

It’s National Library Week next week! Do show our libraries the support they deserve.