Checked Out - Members of the Friends Foundation donated their lives to the library. Those days are over - Articles - CAIR

For more than twenty years, Cynthia Monley had devoted a good part of her life to the Denver Public Library.... Every day they sifted, looking for the 30,000 to 35,000 gems people had come to expect, and which had made the book sale a Denver tradition, drawing as many as 15,000 people to the Denver Civic Center and raising as much as $65,000 in a weekend.

Many of the volunteers involved with this project had worked with the library since the 1970s and were such familiar faces inside the building that they were often mistaken for employees. They had helped build the DPL's reputation as the most prestigious public library between Chicago and Los Angeles....

So Monley and the other volunteers were shocked in May 2002, when the library administration informed them that their countless hours of volunteering had actually cost the library more money than they had raised. City Librarian Rick Ashton had analyzed the Friends' efforts and came to the conclusion that fundraising was better consolidated in-house, even at the risk of alienating an influential segment of Denver society.

"Rick Ashton didn't like the idea we had this function he had no control over," says Bonnie Silverman, who volunteered at the library for 25 years. "It's a control thing. He wants to have all the money and do with it as he will."

The Friends bowed out gracefully, retreating to a smaller role of overseeing the $4 million endowment they'd built over the years. But they didn't miss the irony of the library's longtime fundraising group being gutted even as the Denver Public Library faces one of the worst budget crunches in its history.... In its 114-year existence, the DPL has acquired 4,646,769 holdings (including 356 copies of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and 98 of Hillary Clinton's A Living History), which are distributed across one central library, 23 branches and one bookmobile. There are 438,470 registered library-card holders -- just 125,000 shy of Denver's entire population.

And for eighteen years, Rick Ashton has been managing these assets....

$141,264 -- more than either the mayor or the governor.

That there is a new Central Library gracing downtown is, in great part, thanks to the Denver Public Library Friends Foundation. They played a crucial role in raising campaign funds and marshaling volunteers to walk door to door in 1990, when Ashton wanted money for his new facility.

...the Friends raised more than $5 million to pay for furnishings, study rooms and other features that were not covered by the bond issue.

In May 2002 the already-tense relationship blew up. At Ashton's prompting, Steve Taylor, DPL finance director, prepared a now-infamous memo that claimed for every $1 raised by the Friends, 78 cents went to support the group's operating costs....In total, Taylor claimed the library provided $265,479 in services to the Friends in 2001....

The Booklover's Ball is still scheduled for November 15, but it is now being organized by the DPL's three-person fundraising staff, including Diane Christman, director of the office of advancement and communication, who earns $84,672 per year....

Ashton compares creating a library district to Denver Health's spinoff from the city into a semi-independent agency with its own personnel system, legal staff and other internal arrangements. The proposed library district would have a governing board whose members would be approved by the Denver City Council -- as members of the Library Comission are now, after being nominated by the mayor -- which provides at least some system of checks and balances. Ashton had hoped to get a district proposal on the ballot as soon as this November, but then Mayor Hickenlooper told him that his priority is a vote to change the city's personnel system....

[Mayor] ickenlooper says. "I think it's an intriguing idea. One of the things we need to move toward is establishing priorities. What is the long-term funding for our most cherished services?"

In fact, that's exactly the question some of the people who know the library best -- and love it the most -- have been asking. They say they'll oppose the proposed district, not necessarily because they're against the idea, but because they view it as a way for Ashton to consolidate his power and operate with little oversight.

...there is concern that the push for more populist material is an effort to win the DPL more accolades. "It's anti-intellectual," says A.J. Moses, a circulation clerk who recently left the library after four years. "Collections are being stripped and replaced by popular literature. I'm surprised they don't have a pornography room -- that would boost the numbers....

Many staffers and volunteers at the library say that Ashton and other managers have created an authoritarian atmosphere where librarians with years of experience are treated like widgets.

A lending library like the DPL discards thousands of books a year as new volumes arrive and demand space on the shelves. But what was once sorted and categorized, ready for the annual book sale, is now available to anyone, anywhere, via Amazon.com.... Through a partnership with the firm bLogistics, Amazon receives a 15 percent commission on each book sold, while bLogistics -- which stores the books in a Boulder warehouse -- and the library each receive 42.5 percent of the revenues....

Monley and the volunteers went down to the library's dock to investigate. What they found appalled them: box after box of books heading to the dump. "We thought it was a mistake and went down and took them out of the trash," Monley says. "They went on throwing the books away, even though they were good books for the book sale. We always sold them; they were $18 or $19 books. They were throwing away art books -- they sell beautifully; some were in perfect shape inside. We'd sell them for $7 or $8, and they'd go in minutes."

Library director Rick Ashton plans to convert Denver's libraries to Spanish-language libraries.