Saturday, April 20, 2019

The City of Boise public library system costs just 7.3 cents per person a day to run






















On April 18, 2019 there was an article in the Idaho Statesman by Hayley Harding titled ‘We should be trusting our government.’ says new Boise group backing $85 million library. Naturally the Idaho Freedom Foundation is against the long overdue new library:

“Spokesman Dustin Hurst told the Statesman that the Freedom Foundation objects to the library’s cost and believes the city has spent irresponsibly in the past.”  


To back that up there was an article at their web site on April 2, 2019 by policy analyst Lindsay Atkinson with the whining title Boiseans already pay $6 million a year to run the library system, and have received no estimate on how that number may grow. She declared that:

“In 2018, the latest fiscal year for which we have data available, the cost for running the entire library system was $6,033,430.”























But she never explained the relevance of that figure – what’s in it for me. That’s bad storytelling.  The US Census bureau had estimated the city’s 2017 population at 226,570.





























Divide $6,033,430 by 226,570 and you get $26.63 per person per year. That’s roughly the delivered price for a pair of large pizzas. Further divide that 26.63 by 365.25 days per year, and you get a price per person per day of just 7.3 cents. That’s chicken feed.

Oscar Wilde once had said that:

“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

Page 110 of the 2019 city budget lists benefits for the library. The library circulated 2,600,000 items in fiscal year 2017 - 11.5 items per person each year, almost one per month. It answered 221,000 reference questions or almost one per person. There were 1,300,000 customer visits or 5.74 visits a year - almost one every two months. There were 119,000 registered borrowers - 52.5% of residents.

Back on July 12, 2016 I blogged about How to make statistics understandable. A novice writer like Lindsay Atkinson needs to learn from that post.  

The cartoon man and combo pizza images came from Wikimedia Commons.

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