As more and more Park Ridge residents are now realizing, our community is in big financial trouble.  In that respect it may be like a lot of other Illinois communities, but that shouldn’t provide us any consolation.

As the City Council stumbles around trying to figure out whether to spit or go blind, it appears to us that some of the City’s financial issues are easier to address than others.

Take the Park Ridge Library, for example. 

According to yesterday’s article in the Park Ridge Herald-Advocate (“Library looking to cut $300K from its budget,” March 2), the Library’s executive director, Janet Van De Carr, is troubled by the cuts required from the Library’s budget.  The source of her consternation and woe: circulation and visits that are expected to reach an all-time high this year, allegedly because of the bad economy.

“At a time when we are having more and more need for our services, we have to look at cutting back,” said Van De Carr.

While we’re big fans of libraries generally, the bottom line – literally and figuratively – is that library services are an amenity, especially in this day and age when so much information is readily available over the Internet.  Although the Library’s services may be desirable to certain segments of our community who are regular users, there is little-to-no actual “need” for them.  Or at least not anywhere close to the degree that water, sewers, police and fire protection are needed.

But if Janet and The Librarians don’t want to cut their budget by that full $300,000, they should try raising some additional revenues.

They can start by charging for all those free programs they run – programs for which attendance also appears to help inflate the Library’s usage numbers.  Judging from just the Library’s most recent four-color glossy mailing (that’s a cost that can be saved right off the bat), a reasonable charge for all of those programs might generate some decent revenue; e.g., 30 program attendees at $10 apiece = $300.  Do that 20 times per month and you have $72,000 a year – not a king’s ransom, to be sure, but a lot better than a sharp stick in the eye.

Of course, we expect this suggestion to create howls of outrage from the freeloaders who flock to such programs so long as somebody else (a/k/a, the non-user taxpayers) is paying the lion’s share of the costs.  That usually includes parents of young children for whom these programs – along with many of the programs offered by the Park Ridge Park District – effectively serve as no-cost/low-cost babysitting.

Sorry, folks, but it’s way past time you learned that our taxes pay for the Library building, basic operations and basic staffing.  Entertainment should cost extra, just like it does for cable television, at the movie theater, etc.

In addition to looking at ways to increase revenues, we suggest that the Library staff try finding a less expensive alternative to the $96,000 that is being allocated for “improvements” to the outdoor seating area and lawns south of the Library’s main entrance.  They should make do for the time being with a grand or two worth of topsoil and sod.

In only a few paragraphs we just took care of more than half of what the Library is expected to cut out of its 2010-11 budget, and we didn’t even break a sweat.  But that’s because the Library budget isn’t that big a challenge; and because we took the essential first step of distinguishing true “needs” from mere “wants.”

Until the City Council is willing to do the same, Park Ridge will continue to slide down the increasingly slippery financial slope.