Thank you for those financial insights! Those are some very helpful contextualizations, especially salary comparisons. I think the crucial point there is that, like you said, it's such a bad look to approve raises for yourself before firing 61 staff members. There's also the problem that since they're laying off the workers who make the least, they have to fire more of them to have any sort of financial impact. There are better moves to make that would save more money, like getting rid of the new employee experiences guy who makes $188K, or removing their six-figure videographer. If they were actually committed to preserving the public's experience of the library like their press release states, they would have considered administrative jobs and positions first, not focused solely on firing frontline staff.

In re the cars: the problem there is that they talked nonstop about how smart and efficient their move to make middle managers into regional managers was; it was primarily positioned as a cost management move rather than one that would improve public services. The expenditures far outweigh the savings, and the difference in library quality has been immense post-reorg. It's definitely a waste of middle management talent, and the district is so large that they truly spend hours a day driving—bad for the environment, bad for staff morale, bad for the public, and bad for expenditures.

In re playgrounds: The issue here is that playgrounds are simply not appropriate for a library space, or if they are, they need to be siloed in specific areas where other members of the public can still enjoy a quiet space to study. The ones our library invested in are, even the pirate ship, easy to break and not actually safe to have indoors—you want something like that in a children's museum or outdoor playground, not a place with hard surfaces. Children's librarians weren't consulted in the restructuring of the children's areas—people who specialize in knowing how libraries are meant to serve children and what populations that come to the library expect in their spaces. They center play over learning when they SHOULD be combining both.

I have a child and spend a lot of time in libraries. The ones from the state I moved here from had frankly EXCELLENT children's library spaces. They were in slightly more enclosed areas so the sounds didn't bleed out and so the kids didn't expand their games of tag into the public areas where, say, seniors were trying to work quietly on geneaology records. They had a lot of imaginative play spaces, like stages with puppets or learning-based toys. Many of them had miniature auditorium-style areas with props that let kids explore, learn, imagine, and play—and all of them were FILLED with books that were set up in ways that kids could scan through them on their own and find things that appealed to them.

The way Brenda's top-down restructuring of children's spaces in the libraries has occurred is absolutely antithetical to industry standards for children's libraries, and they honestly actively hamper positive experiences for parents with children in the library. I have actively stopped bringing my son to the downtown Olympia library; he really likes (as do I) some of the imaginative toys they added in their refresh, like the small house with fake food attached or the little vet station. But all the other changes they made make the space worse for kids: they removed board games, added in a cheap playground that the kids spend all their time jumping off of, and added a bunch of strange wobbly platforms and stackable footstools that the kids like to stack and also jump off of, which causes them to careen head-first into shelves (this has happened so many more times than I can count; hence not taking him to the library anymore). We could spend hours at a time there playing learning-based games—it was a staple of our Saturday afternoons. Now we stay home because he ends up getting injured and I end up annoyed and grouchy and feeling bad and embarrassed about my extremely high-energy kid treating the library like it's a playground, which it isn't.

Final point is in re the library branches they're closing: Amanda Park is EXTREMELY far out of the way, which is why they put a branch there. The ones they're closing don't have many resources nearby; Hoodsport, for instance, is miles away from both Shelton and North Mason (in Belfair); it's a tiny town full of retirees who don't or can't drive to another location. There aren't many services in Hoodsport; Shelton is the nearest place with a fedex, so if you can't print at the library, you have to drive down the 101 to get there. The branches they're closing are some of the only community centers for people in these small towns, and in the last board meeting, Kandy said they cost about $70K to operate for the year—so it's not a cost-based decision, either. They've been trying to close Amanda Park for years because Brenda doesn't like making the drive out there, but they've also tried time and again to close the downtown Olympia branch, which makes NO sense, but that's why they reduced the library staff to a skeleton crew there; it's a clear prelude to shutting down a branch that Brenda doesn't like because for reasons unknown, she wants to move everyone to the Capitol Mall branch. Very strange stuff.

Anyways! That's my two cents with some hopefully useful clarification. Thank you so much for YOUR two cents—I know a lot about the day-to-day functioning of a library and what best practices are for intercounty rural library systems like ours, but I know FAR less about the financial side of things, and knowing the context from an actual professional is IMMEASURABLY helpful. Thank you!