missing title

All right, good morning.

Sorry, let me start over.

I have my coffee here, luckily.

Good morning.

Today is February 25th, 2026. This is a meeting of the Libraries Education and Neighborhoods Committee and it will come to order.

It's 9.32 a.m.

I'm Maritza Rivera, chair of the committee.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

Councilmember Foster.

Council Member Lynn.

Here.

Council Member Rink.

Present.

Vice Chair Hollingsworth.

Chair Rivera.

Thank you, Clerk.

And Vice Chair Hollingsworth is excused until she gets here.

We have four Council Members present.

Thank you, Chair.

I mean, thank you, Clerk.

Today we will be hearing from the Seattle Public Libraries team on part two of the 2019 levy background and overview.

If there's no objection, the agenda will be adopted.

And I see Vice Chair Hollingsworth and CP Hollingsworth has joined.

Thank you, Vice Chair for being here and Council President.

Hearing no objection, the agenda is adopted.

We will now open the hybrid public comment period.

Public comment should relate to items on the agenda or when the purview of this committee.

Clerk, how many speakers are signed up today?

Currently, we have one in-person speaker and no remote speakers.

Thank you.

Given that, the speaker will have two minutes.

Clerk, will you please read the public comment instructions?

The public comment period will be moderated in the following manner.

The public comment period is up to 20 minutes.

Each speaker will have two minutes.

Speakers will be called in the order in which they registered.

We will start with in-person speakers first and then remote speakers until the public comment period has ended.

Speakers will hear a chime when 10 seconds are left of their time.

The public comment period is now open.

We will begin with the first speaker on the list.

Our first speaker is Brittany Murawski.

Hi, good morning.

Good morning.

Thank you, Chair Rivera and council members.

My name is Brittany Morosky.

I serve as a board member for the Seattle Public Library Foundation and as advocacy chair.

So I look forward to working with all of you.

I know this is an important year for the library.

And as you know, the foundation is the library's primary nonprofit partner.

We provide above and beyond support for library collections, spaces, and programming.

I want to address programming today.

At last week's hearing, several of you mentioned the need for our libraries to be safe, open, and accessible spaces for all.

I completely agree.

And that's why programming is so essential.

Programs are invitations.

They draw people in and activate our library spaces like nothing else.

They provide fun, communal experiences for people of all ages.

And once people feel that sense of welcoming, they come back again and again.

SBL hosts so many engaging programs that respond to community interests and needs.

I know for me, I love author talks, and I get really excited about summer book bingo, which brings me into the library to find new things to read.

But we also know that we can do more.

Each year, when we review the impact of donor investments, we ask, can we scale this?

We often hear about the barriers presented by not having enough library staff capacity to expand and continue programming.

Our hope is that every branch has the positive energy that comes from beloved programs like homework help, toddler story time, English conversation circle, as many days a week as we can.

When libraries have that energy, our shared investments in the institution delivers value.

They allow more neighbors to feel welcome and more of our spaces to feel fun and safe.

Thank you for believing in the power of programming and please help us continue that as we continue to talk about the renewal of the levy.

Thank you.

Thank you, Speaker.

Chair, that was our last speaker.

All right.

There are no additional registered speakers.

The public comment period is now closed.

We'll proceed to our item of business.

Will the clerk please read item one into the record?

Agenda item one, Seattle Public Library 2019 levy background and overview part two for briefing and discussion.

All right.

Good morning again, colleagues and members who are joining us in person and who might be watching online on the Seattle Channel, award-winning Seattle Channel.

As you know, in anticipation of the Seattle Public Library Levy renewal, we met last Thursday, February 19, to hear part one of the 2019 Seattle Public Library Levy Background and Overview.

which covered three of the six 2019 levy investment buckets.

We covered books and technology, sorry, books and materials, technology and online services and building maintenance.

Today we're going to be hearing from SPL on part two of the overview with Chief Librarian Faye and his team.

We're gonna be talking about the other three remaining investment priority buckets, which include hours and access, helping children, and administration and central costs.

Patrons have said in surveys from 2012 and 2018 that hours and access are their top priority and they see their branches as essential third places or critical education resource and that they're worth the investment.

These presentations are an opportunity as I said last time for SPL to show how they're responding to priorities, to the priorities of the 2019 levy investments.

They are how we as a city show our work.

This is how we can let taxpayers know who are the ones who so generously supported the libraries through property tax increases.

We let them know how their tax dollars are being spent, their tax dollars at work.

This is really important to me as you all know showing the public The value of their dollar as they invest in these really critical services at the city So let's move on to today's agenda and learn more about these levy funded services and programs Today we have four presenters chief librarian Tom Fay Rob Gannon Kay Tang and Kirsten Nelson would you Please state your names for the record, even though I just said it, I'll let you say it too, and then we can start the presentation.

And then colleagues, it's a long presentation like last time, so if you have questions, please raise your hand, and I'm happy to, so you don't have to wait till the entire slide deck to ask questions.

Thank you.

Great, thank you, Chair Rivera.

My name's Tom Fay, I'm the chief librarian for the Seattle Public Library.

Good morning, Chair Rivera.

My name is Kay Tang and I'm the Director of Library Experience and Engagement.

Kirsten Nelson, Government Relations for the Seattle Public Library.

Good morning, members of the committee.

My name is Rob Gannon.

I'm the Director of Administrative Services for the Seattle Public Library.

Alright, well thank you again for having us here and it's always a pleasure to highlight the work of a great staff of 700 folks providing services to the residents of Seattle.

Today we're going to be going over the levy administration and central costs which is a bucket in the levy hours and access and then helping children and as you know last week we did go over collections building maintenance and technology and online services and I do understand that both these presentations will be available on the council's website we will also make these available on our website to tie with the rest of our levy reports that we do annually, just so that they're there in one place.

And I'll turn this next section over to Rob Gannon.

Thank you, Tom, again.

Good morning, members of the committee.

We will start with just a very brief overview of the library's budget.

I want to note that these slides are unchanged from our presentation last time before the committee, but they set an important context for the rest of our discussion this morning.

The chart on this slide depicts the council-approved budget for the library in 2026. The majority of our funding is provided by the city's general fund, about 58%.

The levy contributes about one-third of our budget.

A small portion comes from other sources, including city-generated real estate excise tax, funds from the generous donors of the Seattle Public Library Foundation, and other library gift funds.

We also generate a very small amount of revenue from certain services that we provide at the library for a small fee, including parking, printing, and then recovery of fees from lost items.

We have pointed out on many occasions, but it bears repeating, that the bulk of our budget goes to operations.

This is for providing staff for our open hours acquiring books and other materials for our patrons' behalf, and maintaining our buildings.

We're a slide ahead of where we need to be.

Library has a capital budget for major projects and equipment, and this comprises about $2.6 million in 2026. All right, this slide is a view of our budget by funding source.

So you see from 2020 through the present, the period of the current library, you see overall growth year to year in the library's budget.

This provides a breakdown by funding type, general fund and revenue, the library levy, and then private funds.

You can see that each category has grown in dollar amount over the year, but growth has been especially notable on the levy side or on the levy portion.

This slide shows roughly the same information, but instead of in whole dollar amounts, it shows it by relative portion.

So in this depiction, you see that foundation dollars have remained relatively constant year over year throughout the period of the levy, while the general fund overall has declined in the share of funding it contributes to library operations, and the bulk of that difference is made up by the levy.

This slide breaks down annual funding by category.

So the levy is broken into distinct categories of the types of spending that were anticipated at the outset of the levy, and then guide our operations and expenditure throughout the course of the levy.

Both the 2012 levy and the 2019 levies made use of the same distinct categories that provides legibility year over year, but also assures that we are focused on the major areas that are important to library operations.

As Tom made mention in his introduction, we have been talking about each of these categories, and today we'll be talking about admin and central costs, hours and access, and helping children.

we are going to go in a intentional order and present first the administrative costs of the library.

These are essentially the costs that are borne by the levy that support actual administration of the library.

This is a modest amount of the overall levy funding, and what it does provide for is two positions, two FTE.

One is a part-time levy analyst, and another is a financial analyst in our finance department spread across two positions, prorated portion.

This allows us to do the actual administration of the levy, assure that funds are apportioned in the proper way, that we have year to year, month to month, even pay period to pay period of counting of how the levy funds are being spent.

The category also helps fund some central costs provided by the City of Seattle.

So at one point in the current levy, these costs were added to the levy.

It is a common practice in the broad sense of the budget that central costs are allocated across the general fund.

In 2023, however, CBO, the City Budget Office, recognized that the levy portion was not bearing its appropriate share of central cost, and so there was an adjustment made.

So you'll see in the next slide, This slide depicts the total amount year-over-year that is dedicated to administrative costs.

In 2024, the central costs were added and that accounts for the jumps in 2024, 2025 and 2026. In 2023 there was also a modest jump compared to prior years.

This was the year we used levy funds to support the development of our strategic plan through a comprehensive study of the future of libraries, which included robust community engagement and helped inform the strategic plan that's in place today.

This slide gives a large overview.

It's a format consistent with last week's presentation, but you see here that most of the administrative costs of the Seattle Public Library are borne by the general fund, and only very small portions are borne by the levy and private funds.

And this slide depicts the actual dollars behind the prior slide.

Administrative costs, although a small portion of the overall levy funding, do provide us an important opportunity, and that is it provides support for transparent and regular reporting of the ways in which the funds provided by the levy are expended.

It allows us to do in-depth progress reports that reflect our regular accounting and distribution of these funds and it gives us the ability to produce quarterly reports.

These quarterly reports, as Tom has mentioned, are posted on our website and are almost an in-the-moment view of how the library is period to period expending the dollars of the levy.

These reports are also featured in our Board of Trustees meetings, and we make regular updates to them to inform all of our Leverie progress.

So this presentation, of course, speaks to a seven-year period, but we want to emphasize that we are doing this update on a regular basis with our Board, and it's always available to the public.

With that, I'll turn it back to Tom.

All right, thanks Rob.

Pardon me.

I've been speaking a lot here in the last couple weeks, so I have a little bit of the gravelly voice from that.

The next area we'll talk about is our open hours and access.

And as you all know, it's our library staff that allow us to keep our libraries open all the hours that we are.

And the levy funds approximately 25% of all library positions.

By providing library open hours, we provide community access to 27 safe and welcoming spaces with over 1.8 million physical books and other items.

We provide information services staff who answer many thousands of questions each year.

Through our Ask Us service, we answered 37,000 questions in 2025. And these questions range from hours, services, research requests, program information, genealogy requests and much more.

We also have 22 locations with free public meeting rooms.

We have free private study rooms at 17 locations and thousands of free programs each year within the walls of the library.

And of course, we have free access to Wi-Fi, computers, device charging, assistive technologies, and much more.

And finally, as we have all become aware with climate change, Our buildings act as critical cooling and warming and clean air centers for community during our adverse weather conditions that from time to time pop up.

Our open hours at Central also provides access to two music practice rooms, rentable meeting rooms for private events, a level eight art gallery, courtesy phones and an assistive technology lab that we'll share a little bit more about later in the presentation.

Chief, can you tell us a little bit about how you guys do communications to let folks know about the music room, the art gallery at the central?

I'm not sure everyone is aware, so would love to hear a little bit about how you let folks know.

Sure.

Most of that is going to be on our website.

It's also in our signage in the Central Library.

We also get general inquiries from the public about spaces where people can practice.

It's not only a feature at Central per se.

Someone may rent out at a branch a meeting room to do a music practice session as well.

So we're used to people needing a space to actually practice, which is when you have a lot of apartment living, it is not easy to do.

So we are pretty good at making sure people know about that either through signage, through the website, and through our newsletters that go out.

and our friends and our foundation also have newsletters and they're able to put that kind of information out.

And do you put that type of information out at all the branches?

Like here's what's available at your central location because it is the bigger location and there are a lot of cool things in the central location.

Yeah, and I think that's the key for our information services staff.

They have a complete understanding of what the entire system offers.

Pardon me. so they can redirect or refer patrons to the best location that's gonna really serve their need.

Great, thank you.

And can you tell us, it looks like there aren't meeting rooms in all, there's 22 of the 27 locations, so only five don't.

I assume that's related, I'm sort of asking a leading question here, but I assume it's related to space at those branches.

Correct.

It's generally the smaller locations that don't have those meeting rooms.

And do you then, for those patrons, redirect them to the closest branch nearest their branch?

Absolutely.

If they're looking for free, we know our community centers also offer options for folks, so we're able to, again, refer folks to the one that best suits their needs.

Terrific.

Thank you, Chief.

Great, and as we look at library hours, we currently offer 1,398 system-wide hours per week.

This is a modest increase over what was 2019, which was before we entered this current levy.

At that time, we had about 1,377 per week.

Means about eight to 10 hours of service a day at our locations.

14 locations are open seven days a week.

12 locations are open six days a week.

and we determine ours based on patron usage, community need, staffing capacity, and union contract obligations.

And then as we look at some of the hours and challenges, I know I've presented to this group before over the last few years about some of those challenges.

Through the life of this levy, we had a system-wide closure, pardon me, due to COVID-19.

and of course that presented a variety of hiring challenges as there were hiring freezes during that time which meant we held a lot of vacancies.

It was followed again by more challenging hiring environment during the Great Resignation where we were seeing people move around quite a bit during that time and then we've also had some additional hiring freezes or pauses during some of the general fund concerns with budget over the last several years.

However, in 2025, we introduced fixed schedules with our union labor partner.

This helped both stabilize open hours for our patrons and provided more predictable schedules for our staff.

The other area where we looked to increase access was going fine free.

In 2020, the levy funded the elimination of overdue fines.

we found disproportionate impacts of overdue fines in some areas of the city, particularly in neighborhoods with low median incomes.

This change alone restored library access for over 18,000 patrons whose accounts were suspended.

Many of those could have been children.

They may have been children and then became adults.

It really brought a lot of people back to the library.

So it was a really big win for access.

And I know having lived through that as we put that levy forward, there was a lot of concern about library materials being returned and so we, had said that we would continue to monitor it, which we do to this day.

And patrons continue to return items at about the same rate as before.

And as you might know, we still require that you return your items to the library.

And if you don't, of course, we charge lost fees, not late fees, but lost fees if you don't return the items.

But if you find the item and return it, those fees are waived and your access is returned.

So only about 8% of items checked out are overdue at any one time, which doesn't really move much over the course of the years.

Another area that we took advantage of utilizing levy funds and leveraging levy funds was with our 24-7 holds pickup lockers.

Those now are at seven locations.

They allow patrons access to our collections at their convenience 24 hours every day of the week.

And we'll share more about that in later slides.

The other area where we Did you have a question?

Are we moving on?

I was, yes.

Okay, let me just, I do have a question about hours and access.

And in terms of the fine free borrowing, I have to give a shout out to former Mayor Jenny Durkan who really cared about the fact that she didn't want to limit access based on if someone knew they were going to have high fines and then they stopped using the library in many cases.

kids and especially in communities, underserved communities as well was my understanding at the time.

She wanted to make sure that that was not a factor why folks were not utilizing the library.

So wanna give a shout out to former Mayor Durkin for caring about that.

And then I do have a question about, I mean, it's more a comment.

Most folks don't know what 1,398 library hours you know amount to but when you say seven days a week and six days a week how long or is that eight hour days or is how you know because I know weekends are also for I mean both include weekends and seven days a week and even six days a week but is that does the hours in a day shift by location for instance

It does.

So we try to have a regional approach to how we arrange our branches and our scheduling.

And so with that, you might have a branch that's open eight hours in a region.

You might have a branch that's open ten hours because it has evening hours.

So we try to balance that in a region so that someone has a library that might be open a few hours later in the evening.

if there is that need in that region.

So hopefully then you're not driving all the way across town or down to central.

We try to really take that all into account when we're making those schedules.

Thank you, Chief.

And we talked about this last time as well, that you work with the community that lives around the branches, who's going to be more likely to use the branch to determine programming, for instance, and also library hours in this case as well.

Yeah, and it's really important, thank you for that, because it's important to note that when we came out of the pandemic, we had, I believe you mentioned the 2018 survey.

We actually did a survey in 2022 to really test our assumptions that we had in 2018 around ours.

And in that period of time and due to the pandemic, the community's needs and opinions changed on those hours.

So we did address it at that time and were constantly engaging with the public to find out what is important to them.

Thank you, Chief, and thank you for flagging that.

I was not aware there was yet another survey in 2022. I know you have a survey for 2025 that you will be sharing soon.

I have not seen it, but I know that you all will be sharing that soon.

Yes, we will be.

Again, it was a very robust survey.

So one other item here, just on access, one of the other pieces that we did again to really, from a convenience standpoint, and an access standpoint is move to automatic renewals.

So any item that you have checked out that doesn't have a hold request waiting for it can renew up to three times.

And many libraries across the country have transitioned to this from anywhere from two to five automatic renewals.

It really just helps the user experience and it and I'm one of those that uses that.

I get a little behind on my reading and I appreciate not missing out on that book.

So it is a really convenient feature.

And of course, during this time as well, as we think about hours and access, there's many things that go into that, but security is another one of those.

And we borrowed on 11, excuse me, I apologize, nine security officer positions during this levy as well to have 24 total security staff that are available throughout the system.

Can I ask you about security?

Does that mean, does every branch have security?

Well, not every, because I know it's only 24 people for 27 branches, but I guess what I'm trying to get to is how do you determine where security goes?

I think I have a assumption, but I don't want to assume.

So we have our probably the largest number of security at Central.

It's a 380,000 square foot building.

It takes a little bit to manage.

It's a lot of space to cover.

And then the remaining folks are then out in the regions and out in the branches.

So it might be something where we have somebody posted at a high incident location.

They may be posted there more frequently.

We may have an area that pops up that we have some more incidents and then we might put emphasis patrols there.

But generally the teams are going to rove as they need to and respond to incidents as they come in.

and I'm proud of the work that our security team provides.

Their de-escalation means that we're making sure people are successful being in the space, which is what we really want.

Thank you Chief and I know my kids have experienced in the branch that they go to and our branch folks are there and they're all there together and your folks are so helpful and there isn't a security person there that I have seen but the staff is very welcoming and you know and everyone's able to be there and do what they're doing there, whether it's homework or reading or our seniors, engaging with other seniors and then folks who are there because obviously they have nowhere else to be.

And everyone's there together, which is great.

Chair, can I ask?

Yes, Council Member Lynn, you are recognized to speak.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you for talking about your security and the emphasis on de-escalation and just want to follow up.

You've probably seen there is a recent sort of article in the Urbanist raising some employee concerns about potential new protocols, suspensions of patrons who might be dealing with mental health or behavioral health issues and sort of the impact it's having on those patrons who are really, the libraries are such an essential service for them.

And I know that we're focused on the levy here, and so one, I just want to double check that nothing in the levy would sort of preclude feedback or on those, there's nothing prescriptive that you're expecting in terms of sort of the levy that would change those or would allow the flexibility to change them as needed?

No, there wouldn't be.

It is unfortunate that the urbanists did not follow up with us.

The one thing that we did when we moved from rules of conduct to the community use agreement was we spent a lot of time in space with a variety of our folks who are in library all the time.

That might be those who are unhoused, it might be youth that come into some of our locations.

And so we spent a lot of time in space trying to come up with a community use agreement that looks again at how do you make sure that you're doing everything you can to make sure people are successful in that space.

And really looking at what had been in many cases very punitive and the old rules of conduct where somebody would go right into a suspension that could be six months or a year.

And so when we look at the numbers now, what we see is we have shorter suspensions.

People have a bad day.

I have bad days.

Kids have bad days.

We were all teenagers.

So what we see now is we see shorter suspensions.

We may have a few more of those, but we don't see the longer, more extensive suspensions, meaning that those services then are available to the people who really need them.

And I think our team does a great job of trying to change that because it is a different approach than what had been in place.

but that also had a ton of staff input into that process.

I mean, quite a bit of staff input into that process.

And I know there were some things made or concerns made about calling 911 or SPD.

Those protocols have been in place for a long time.

There are situations that get out of hand, unfortunately, and it is really our last recourse.

I think SPD has a great partnership with us.

I think they know that.

that we rely on them only for the worst of situations.

We're also very appreciative of our FIRE, Health One care team, all of whom partner with us in a number of issues.

When we are approaching crisis, we know we can call CARE we can call HealthOne and they know the library, they know our staff, they know our teams.

So yes, I wish the urbanists would have worked with us a little bit more to find out more of what went into all of this.

Thank you for that, and hopefully maybe there could be some updated information shared about that, because I know that you're in a difficult situation, you need to provide safety and security for all, and at the same time, as you said, just because somebody has a bad day one day doesn't mean they're going to have a bad day the next day, and it is such an essential service.

I was glad to hear that you had a lot of employee input and I just in general, you know, I hope that there's a lot of employee input that is being provided into this whole levy process because I just think it's so critical that employee voice has a seat at the table and is a part of this decision making.

Thank you.

Yeah, thank you Chief Faye.

You know, sometimes some stories are written and departments in the city are not reached out to and have the ability to provide feedback.

We all know that not everything you read is accurate and so this is why it's important to have these opportunities when we're interacting with Seattle Public Libraries, with not just Chief Fay, but his team, who can talk about their experiences because they're the ones that are actually handling the situation.

Notwithstanding what someone might say, we're getting here, what is actually happening.

And I will say, and as a reminder that libraries, lots of patrons use the libraries and they have to be kept safe for everyone.

They are not a social service agency.

and we should not look to them to be that.

That is not what libraries are.

So it is important that we make sure that all patrons have a good experience and I really appreciate how you couch the we want everyone to be successful who is here and sometimes the library will have to make, branches will have to make decisions based on the patrons that are there in relation to other patrons as well.

And the one thing I will say, and I can vouch for the libraries because I've been working with the libraries for the last eight or nine years, is they do a really good job trying to ensure that they're making referrals if there are patrons that show up and is not appropriate for them to be in that space because they might not be safe to themselves or others.

and I really appreciate that approach that Seattle Public Libraries has taken because we want to make sure everyone is successful in this space.

But I caution us because I have heard from library staff who also feels concerned about safety and so we want to make sure everybody is in a safe place and that we're not requiring employees at the library to be something they are not.

That's not fair.

to the library staff and we have other resources in the city that would be more appropriate.

So thank you for talking about your partnerships because I do know you partner with Seattle Fire Department, SPD and now CARE and I want to hear more about CARE because I know they have capacity it sounds like to do more and I'd love to see more partnership with the libraries and other areas of the city where they are appropriate to provide some services of the variety that we're discussing here.

Thank you.

Councilmember Lin.

Chair, I've got a hand.

Okay, sorry I can't see your hands up here.

Councilmember Foster, you are recognized.

Thank you so much, Tara Rivera.

I just wanted to actually ask, it's a funny follow-up given that comment, but I just wanted to ask to hear a little bit more about the social service librarians that you have, because I also understand that's a resource that the library intentionally sort of deploys, just knowing that you're one of the few spaces that people can go for free and have access.

So if you could share more about that, I'd love to learn more.

Sure, we have two social worker positions and then we have a social services librarian at this time and really when this was contemplated in the levy we originally had had a contract with the DESC and you know they did a great job but we had a lot of people rotating in and out because of the nature of that work and Our social workers do not carry a caseload.

That is not what it's about.

We are not providing those services directly at the library.

And what we want from our social services team is to, again, be able to provide our staff with some additional capacity in recognizing some issues that may be coming up, intervening before crisis, getting the right partner in play, getting the right referral in play.

They've been critical in working with our information services staff to make sure that regionally, if you come to a service desk in Ballard, you're going to get referrals to agencies or services or partners in Ballard that do that work.

not sending you across town, not sending people on a chase to try to find services.

So they do a great work of that.

They work with the community at large.

They primarily run out of the central library, but they do obviously provide this recommendation and these services across the system along with our social services librarian who helps communicate that out to all the information services staff.

Got it, thank you.

And actually, just a quick follow-up.

So are they, they're primarily out of Central and then they rotate to different areas in the city, is that correct?

We, from time to time, can move them to different locations, yes, if we have a particular need, we can do that.

And they and our security team are the ones who often are working with HealthONE or CARE or some of our other partners, depending on what the situation is.

Got it, thank you.

And then I believe earlier you referenced, was it 2022 that you said was the survey of library staff?

It was roughly that, if I've got my date right.

I hate to put you on the spot.

And then do you know when the next survey is anticipated?

We have the survey that was completed in 2025. We have the final formatting of that occurring now.

So we hopefully will be able to share that in the upcoming weeks.

That sounds great.

And I'd be really curious to hear as we're really thinking about our public safety system.

I do think that librarians are just like such a rich source of information for us, not just like getting book recommendations, but also what they're observing, seeing and understanding about the experiences of patrons.

So I'd really look forward to hearing those recommendations and especially learning from your staff how that can inform other parts of our safety net response.

So looking forward to getting that, Chief.

Thank you.

Yeah and I think that's a good point.

I think when we look at we have a recent case where we actually been in contact with care on a particular patron and it's actually good because this particular person hasn't been showing up for their Time out in the city, but it is one that they likely will and so it's even that information sharing amongst Departments that helps and it's giving them kind of a preliminary information in case they do so that it can provide better care and service Thank you so much chief.

Thank you chair

All right, well we'll move to the remaining part here as we talk about hours and access.

As you might imagine, the largest expense for the library is labor.

We are people serving people, as we've mentioned here.

It takes many people to keep our libraries open and operating, including librarians, library assistants, shelvers, delivery drivers, security, facility maintenance staff, janitorial, custodial, and many, many more.

It's worth noting that we have talked about it here a few times that our staffing margins are thin.

We know that hiring freezes or pauses, all of those impact staffing levels, retention, and then rehiring when you have to fill those vacancies.

and we know that if we have too many sick calls, we're in cold and flu season as we speak, that can actually set us to the point where we may have to close a branch and send the remaining staff to another location.

When you look at this particular, when you look at this particular slide, you'll notice an increase in 2026 and I did wanna draw it to your attention that this was the five million that was the Columbia retrofit that we utilized to absorb a five million general fund reduction.

So that allowed us to keep our hours stable without impacting the hours.

If you look at this slide, this better illustrates that.

You can see in the orange the general fund going down in 2026 and the levy in blue going up.

and here are the numbers behind those charts.

And then we'll move on to patron traffic.

This gives you a sense of the traffic we see in our locations during open hours.

This map

I see this shift over time with the general fund and the levy growth, and I believe 2020 is when the current levy started, is that correct?

Do you have information that gives us just a more of a, I don't expect you to have this now, Chief, but more of a historical lens so we can see where we left off in 2019 to really understand the change over time between levees?

Yes, we do, and we can provide that to you.

I would love that as a follow-up.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chair.

Go ahead, Chief.

All right.

This particular one shows you the patron traffic by library location.

So if you know your parts of the city.

You can see the various branches here and see the use bubbles.

As you might imagine, Central is the largest and of course most visited library system.

The numbers here are presented by our people counter system, so each location has potentially multiple people counters depending on how many doors it has.

to make sure that we're capturing the folks that are coming in.

They're very sensitive.

It's not the old technologies that just had an infrared beam.

These really can see, not see, but actually count the number of folks coming in and going out.

Just a note, when you look at Lake City and New Holly, we experienced some outages with the system.

So those are a little bit abnormal for where they normally would be.

And if you are looking at university, it has been closed, so its numbers will be low to zero.

And at this time, I'm going to turn over this next section to my colleague, Kay Tang.

Thank you.

and good morning.

I'm gonna continue talking about hours and access.

And to help increase patron access to books and materials, the library installed seven holds pickup lockers.

You can see the locations here, Ballard, Beacon Hill, Broadview, High Point, Montlake, Northeast, and our Rainier Beach branches.

When you use these hold pickup lockers, you're able to use them in English, Chinese, Spanish, as well as Vietnamese.

These were not a levy promise, but we were able to leverage levy funds through staffing resources including our CIP and IT teams to make this happen.

The actual lockers have been funded generously by our donors of the Seattle Public Library Foundation as well as state grants.

This service has allowed us to expand our hours and access specifically for our hold services.

Okay, in this chart, you can see the growth in patron usage.

We installed these lockers at select locations towards the end of 2021 and then added more in the next two years.

You can see that adoption and usage has continually steadily increased.

We expect this trend to continue.

We did see a slight dip in numbers in 2024. That is due to the cyber attack that took our network down.

It did have an effect on our catalog and the system that we use to circulate materials.

The Hold's pickup lockers have really been a staple for many library systems across the country.

They're similar, if you haven't used them yet, to pickup lockers for mail or packages, and they make the library, again, so much more accessible and convenient for folks that might want to use our services, not necessarily during our open hours.

Okay, a little more about our holds pickup lockers.

Again, this has been supported by a variety of funding sources since 2021. Our foundation has provided about $275,000 for our devices.

We did have state funds that helped purchase our locker for our Ballard location.

The city's general fund has helped us fund our system maintenance as well as the service costs for these lockers.

and the levy has supported our construction and the configuration needs that we have for them through our CIP and IT teams.

Okay, I love this.

So another way that we are serving our community is through our mobile services.

Our mobile services team include one walk-on bookmobile.

These are for visits to things like preschools, childcare centers, and community centers.

We have two lobby stop trucks and one delivery van for material delivery.

These are for facilities for older adults, as well as people with disabilities.

The mobile services includes books by home and home service.

This provides free mail or delivery services for patrons who are unable to travel to the library, and I will go into more detail in subsequent slides.

Just so you know, right now, about 66 people are utilizing our books by home service and about 30 people for our home service.

I'm sorry, it was books by mail.

Okay, a little more about our Bookmobile services.

We have different age ranges here, and for our kids, we primarily visit preschools and childcare centers.

These are monthly visits with eligibility requirements for things like being within the city limits, having at least 20 children in the facility, not being within walking distance of a library.

They're for free, low-cost, or subsidized locations or locations that primarily serve students with disabilities.

For our older adults, we're at retirement homes, senior home facilities, and senior centers.

And for people with disabilities, we visit their living facilities, nursing homes, and group homes.

And for fun with the general public, we do bring the Bookmobile to special events and community festivals.

OK, a little bit more about our books by mail as well as our home service.

This service is for individuals available to Seattle residents who are unable to travel to the library.

It may include individuals that have had an illness at least six months in duration or longer.

They could be living with a disability.

And the materials are delivered once a month, either through books by mail or the home delivery service.

The residential service and daycares that we visit are monthly services.

And again, they're at retirement homes, nursing homes, assisted living centers, family homes, and senior centers.

This is where a significant number of the residents have requested our resources and that clients are unable to visit the library either due by age or physical or intellectual disability.

The facility also must demonstrate interest in participating in the program as part of the residents in that facility, and there is an application form.

Two of the types of monthly services that we offer to facilities are library staff that bring carts of materials to the facility, which includes materials for browsing, as well as holds pickups that individuals have requested, and library staff on-site then check those materials out.

and we also have a second which is library staff delivering a deposit of a collection and those are based on the facility's requests or preferences.

Okay, in this slide you can see the different types of facilities included in our mobile services monthly stops.

Just giving a shout out to our 32 preschools and childcare stops for early learners, adult family homes, assisted living facilities, low income housing communities.

We have two tiny home villages as well as retirement homes and more.

We do not see much change with these numbers over the months, nor the types of visits or stops.

So these are pretty consistent with our mobile services unit.

and here you are able to see the number of patrons that we served as well as the circulation of our materials.

It's important to note that the number of patrons is only for those that are individually checking out materials on their personal library cards.

We do offer institutional cards by facility and that does make it a little harder for us to track individual patron use from that.

We believe the numbers in 2025 to be close to around 2,750 patrons.

You can see to the right the map shows the graphic distributions of our stops based on zip code.

You may notice we don't have any stops in the Ballard or Magnolia area.

This area does not have as many qualified locations and so we have transitioned folks either to our books by mail or our home service due to the low number of and patron single facilities.

Thank you, Kay.

And I just want to say, and I mentioned this last week, I was visiting with the residents at Mercy Housing and there was a librarian there with a bunch of books The kids were there and they were enjoying the books and that was really great to see which goes along this mobile service piece.

So thank you for that.

Thank you.

That's so wonderful to hear.

Here we go on this slide.

I am excited to share with you about our Library Equal Access Program or LEAP.

This is a really important service that we provide to support library access.

This is a program of services for patrons who need either accommodations or access to assistive technologies.

These technologies include things like refreshable braille displays, CCTV magnifiers, adjustable height computer desks.

You can find our Leap Lab at our central library on level one.

They are open Mondays from 2 to 6 p.m.

and Wednesdays and Fridays from noon until 6. For ADA accommodations, patrons just need to contact our team member using information provided on this slide.

Again, we provide assistive technologies, and we do have assistive technologies at all of our library locations, and those include screen reader software, screen reader magnification software, and accessibility toolkits with magnifiers and writer guides, as well as speech to text software.

Thank you, Kate.

I think there's some questions.

Council Member Foster, you're recognized.

Thank you, Chair.

Actually, my question was about the access.

And first, let me just say, it's so exciting.

I love it.

And I love the book lockers.

I use them.

I've told the chief this.

I just think it's so cool.

So, going back to the mobile service program, which again I just think is fantastic, I wanted to hear a little bit more about how, in particular, you sort of identify what the intake process is for some of the facilities that serve seniors.

We just recently had HSD in on another committee talking to us about the Age-Friendly Seattle program and all of the work that they do there.

And I'm sort of curious if there's an integration with HSD or how you bring on new facilities.

That's a great question.

Thank you.

Tom, I don't know if you want to...

Well, I know that our team works with the Age-Friendly Seattle.

We have a program manager that works with older adult programming.

And so she's in contact with various city resources as well as King County to make sure that we're in alignment with where some of the need is.

Again, it's a limited team, able to provide that service right now.

But yes, we work with Age Friendly Seattle, we work with King Counties, I can't remember their program now, They also have several as well, especially as we, you know, as the city butts up against King County in areas like South Park, Broadview, you know, we have overlapping patrons that come in from other parts of the region.

So trying to make sure people get the right resource.

Got it, and oh, go ahead.

Oh, and I can add something to that.

So in the library, we call things like big O outreach and little O outreach.

So our big O outreach includes things like our mobile services, our outreach program manager, and then our little O are what we call like in our branches, where we have our feelers out from our librarian information staff, our staff on site that are working within the community and all of those feed into providing insight as to any new facilities that might be coming up, folks coming and asking about them or when we're out in our different outreaches.

So those are all connection points that we also utilize in determining additional stops that we could make or new partners that we could have.

Yeah, thank you.

That's really helpful.

And my interest is just in, you know, making sure that our city departments have that strong cross collaboration.

And so I think your library team, I'm sure you do an excellent job of outreach.

I also know HSD has a similar outreach for seniors and just trying to understand that collaboration.

So I can follow up a little bit.

I see Kirsten taking a note so we can chat about that.

Thank you so much.

And then Chief, on the mobile side, can you talk a little bit more if there's any other, what's the word I want to use here?

I guess innovations or sort of progress that we can expect on these different kind of tools.

So I know with the lockers right now, I go online and I request it and then I can pick it up late at night, which I love.

But there's other kinds of tools that other library systems are using that are more I don't know if integrated is the right word, but are there other things on the horizon we might expect in that mobile outreach space?

Yes, and probably not so much mobile, but more from the access point.

Some of the things we're looking at are kiosks, and it's basically technology that you walk up to a unit, instead of being a hold locker, you can see the books that are available.

You can tap your library card and then you can check out the book you want that's in that particular kiosk.

they make these in a variety of sizes some would you know probably be the size of three refrigerators and then they make some that are the size of a refrigerator hold anywhere from you know 300 items to 700 items so finding you know what we look to do hopefully with our foundation partners this year is be able to explore a couple of these different options and then look at different partners that could be a Seattle housing building.

It could be one of our other partners that we work with.

It could be a community center that's not adjacent to a library.

We think it has a lot of potential, and especially in areas where we know we already have, as Kay pointed out, the little o, the outreach from the branch.

It allows us to extend that access once again farther into the community, but also provide that access, you know, more extended hours.

So, for example, if it's in the Seattle Housing building, that might be available 24-7 depending on the makeup of the building.

If it's in a transit area down for light rail, if that was a possibility, that's available all the time that light rails weren't running.

So those are the types of technologies that we're looking at to really extend that access and it's a cost efficient way to provide that access.

Yes, we have to have some trucking and things like that to move more material around, but much more efficient than trying to say, well, you're going to somehow find property to build a new facility.

Thank you so much, Chief.

I look forward to the idea of book vending machines.

That's what I'm gonna call it.

You did not call it that.

You took great pains to be thoughtful, but that's what I will be referring to it as.

But I will also say just my continued support for library operations and hours because I know that while we can replace the access to books, we can't replace the space that libraries provide, which I think are just essential.

So thank you, Chief.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you for the question.

Thank you Councilmember Foster and actually I was at the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center yesterday for a community event and they have a book vending machine and it exactly looks like a vending machine so yeah but it's just more ways to provide access to books especially kids because there were a lot of kid books in that machine.

So thank you for the question.

Council Member Rink, you're recognized.

Thank you, Chair, and I certainly appreciate those questions from Council Member Foster, and I wanted to build on this point and take us back to the Library Equal Access Program.

And, Chief, I know I've talked to you about, you know, my concerns about the state level cuts happening with our talking book and braille library here in town, and understanding that's not within SPL's purview, it's something that certainly our residents depend on.

And so I don't know if there's an update with what's happening in the state legislative session related to that, but when I'm thinking about our library equal access program, I'm wondering about how we're meeting need.

if you all are engaging with the Disability Commission or some of our disability justice partners, if there's an opportunity to do so, just to see how we can make sure that this program is informed by folks that are using these services.

Sure, I'll take part of it and then I'll ask Kirsten to talk about an update.

But yes, our team is in touch with a variety of partners on that front.

As Kay pointed out, the hours that we have are limited.

Those are the things that I ultimately would like to see is the ability to have that one at Central expanded more.

And while we have the tools that the branches and staff know how to basically utilize those, having teams who are working very closely with partners every day, but also patrons who are coming in every single day like they do at the Central Library, It just gives more fluency in the technologies, also in the needs, so that we can better respond to that.

So we know that there's an opportunity for improvement in that particular area, and I'll have Kirsten give you an update of where we stand at the state legislature.

So for the Washington Talking Book and Braille Library, we were very fortunate in that Representative Thomas, who supports West Seattle, represents West Seattle, she put forth a proviso to fund the Talking Book and Braille Library.

It was included in the House budget, and it has also been included in the Senate budget.

So right now, it is looking very positive.

Obviously, we still have a couple more weeks of the state session, but Representative Thomas has been a huge driver of making sure that there is some funding back to the Washington State Library, especially for talking book and Braille as she realizes how important it is.

Fabulous.

Chair, if I may just follow up on that.

That is fabulous news to hear.

And do we know if that proviso is going to get the Talking Book and Braille Library back to pre-cut levels?

Or are we half there?

Where are we?

Where are we?

It will be pretty significantly funded.

There will be some slight reductions, because I think their original amount that the State Library was asking for a total of $5 million, and the proviso itself is for like $3.8 maybe, somewhere around there.

and so that will focus just on the talking book and braille.

They'd asked for some other services as well to restore that weren't included in the proviso, but it should be pretty significantly stepped up to where people can actually access the library, that particular aspect of the library again.

A big kudos to Representative Thomas.

Provisos were few and far between this year at the state legislature, and to also get others to sign on on that is a big effort.

And as I've talked about here before, the work that Watabal does is something that we can't do in library land.

They have different rights and permissions to produce those works than public libraries can, so we rely on them for our patrons to be able to refer them to those services.

So we're very happy and very proud to say that our team that went down to Olympia this year with our advocacy group, with the foundation and friends met with Representative Thomas who I think our push and our call for really what we needed in Seattle really resonated with her and she was already starting to move that way.

So appreciate all the work going into this.

Certainly, I'll be sending a thank you note, and trust me, I will take the good news where we can get it.

That is great to hear and fingers crossed as we make it through the last part of session.

And I'll just close my remarks at this point, Chair, just to say it would be great if there would be an opportunity to interface a little bit with the Disability Commission just on this program in the future.

Nothing urgent, but I'm just mindful that that's a great body to be able to engage with and get feedback from.

So thank you.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you Councilmember Rink and I'm just going to take the opportunity to give a huge kudos to Chief Fay and his team who really partner at the state level and go down to Olympia.

This isn't new, they've been doing this on many efforts including the e-books issue and some other infrastructure and capital improvement issues and we have a really great partner in SPL to do that.

So I wanna give them kudos for that because it is important to go down to Olympia and tell the state legislators what we need here in Seattle, particularly related to libraries.

All right.

All right, we'll move on to the literacy enrichment and empowerment portion of our hours and access.

This is really about activating our spaces and we won't will turn the attention to how the library leverages our open hours to activate our spaces and promote and facilitate community literacy enrichment and empowerment, which are the impact areas from our strategic plan.

We do this by developing programs that serve all ages and many needs and interests.

We often do this in partnership, as mentioned here today, with community-based organizations.

Library programs include but are not limited to story times and play groups, teen drop-ins, older adult activities, author events, classes and workshops, arts, crafts and gallery exhibits, community celebrations and outreach programs that bring the library to the community.

In 2025, we offered over 5,800 programs to our community, many of them supported in part by the library levy as well as private funds.

All right, I'm going to expand on what Tom just said in this slide, and this shows a broad view of the program categories, how they're funded, and the specific types of programs they include.

There's a lot of information on this slide, but we'll dig into more of it in upcoming slides.

But here you can see it really takes every funding source that we have to bring these programs to our community.

This list of programs is not exhaustive, but it is a good overview of the type of programs that we offer.

Okay, I'm going to first focus on literacy programs, and those offerings include things like our early learning.

These are for family story times and play groups, our raising a reader outreach program.

We'll talk more in depth about these when we move on to helping children section of this presentation.

We also have student support programs.

That includes Library Link.

This is a fabulous partnership that we have with the Seattle Public Schools.

It provides instant access to all of the library's online resources for all SPS students and teachers.

There is no library required for this.

We also have homework help.

This is an after-school drop-in session that we have at nine of our locations.

This is volunteer supported and it reaches an estimated 6,000 students annually.

We hear that 80% of the households that participate in this program speak a language other than English in their home, and that levy dollars fund the library staff that are responsible for coordinating this program.

Something we want to highlight is that a survey of participating students have shown that 76% of students report better understanding of homework assignments, 70% report improved homework completion, and 68% report better grades.

The library also provides free access to virtual tutoring at tutor.com.

This is also a really fantastic resource if you have children or need some tutoring.

This was introduced during COVID when we were unable to provide in-person services.

And we also have literacy programming where we offer reading challenges for both youth and adult.

Some of our programs include our longstanding summer of learning program that is going to be 107 this year.

It includes free activities, programs, and reading challenges all summer long.

We have a popular summer book bingo.

This is a program for adults.

In 2025, 1,741 people participated and turned in a bingo card.

That means we had 29,300 books that were read over that summer in the program, and we had really super readers that completed 845 blackout cards.

So that's impressive.

The last challenge I want to highlight is our global reading challenge, and this is for all Seattle Public Schools.

In 2025, we had over 3,500 students at 72 SPS elementary schools participate, and they formed more than 500 teams.

We're going to give a huge shout out to the Library Links team from Queen Anne Elementary School who won this year's all city title.

And lastly, I want to touch on our digital literacy efforts.

These include things like our basic skills classes for adults.

These are essentials for older adults and adults who speak languages other than English.

They include things like emerging technology classes where topics like 3D printing, AI, cloud computing and more are shared.

And I will step in for one second.

If you haven't had a chance to come to Global Reading, we'll make sure Kirsten will send you kind of the semi-finals and the finals, just so that you can see this.

This is a great program.

These kids come to this having read between five and seven books, knowing them inside and out.

the battle that goes on can go on for hours and how much they know about these books.

So if you ever get a chance, please come down and join me.

It can be heartbreaking if the tiebreakers go long and finally someone loses, but it is a great effort and the excitement and enthusiasm about reading is something special to see.

And I will say that I know as a parent firsthand that the reading chat this summer bingo for the kids, they get really excited to fill that bingo card and I think is such a great way to promote literacy and encourage kids to read over the summer and not lose learning over the summer.

That's one of the ways they one of the things they can do to not lose learning.

So thank you for hosting that.

I think it's really a successful program amongst all the others, but I just know that that one in particular to kids I know is really helpful.

Thank you so much.

Here in this next slide is a little visual.

You can see the numbers of programs by audience type.

Most of our locations have a strong focus on our literacy programs for children, youth, and teens, and you can also see a map of the geographic distribution of these programs.

Okay, now we are going to look at enrichment programs, and these are things that we look to bring joy, creativity, and connection to our patrons through things like author readings, musical performances, community celebrations, classes on writing, gardening, and more.

Another way we do this is through our Museum Pass program, which provides free access to 17 popular Seattle cultural institutions, like the Seattle Art Museum, the Seattle Aquarium, the Woodland Park Zoo, Burke Museum, Mopop, and we have two new additional items through the Seattle Parks, and those are the Volunteer Park Conservatory as well as the Seattle Japanese Garden.

Just one point on that partnership with Parks.

It took us almost a year to get put together and we have been trying for ages to actually make something work out and we are so excited and the response from the community has been fantastic.

This is a really good partnership that we are so happy to actually finally have in place with Parks.

Kudos to you and kudos to Parks.

for making that partnership happen.

Sometimes things take longer than we would like them to, but when we get there, it's worth the effort.

So thank you.

Council Member Lin, you're recognized.

Thank you so much, Chair.

Just on that, the idea of partnerships with parks, that's wonderful to hear.

Just similarly with the Office of Arts and Culture, I see a lot of these enrichment activities with arts and cultural groups.

just would love to encourage if you're not already to make sure you're coordinating with them they have those deep relationships with our arts and cultural communities or you know as you plan for new facilities and think about sort of artwork in your new spaces just encourage that collaboration or thank you thank you yes and and we most certainly do Councilmember Lynn we work with them on a number of fronts it might be our artist in residency that we have as a program

It's also through some of our humanities programs.

When we have authors, it's tying in the arts to those.

So they've been a great partner over the years.

Thank you, Councilmember Merlin.

Thank you, Chief.

Thank you, Chair.

In this slide, you can see a chart that shows the distribution of our enrichment programs across all of our locations, as well as the audiences they serve.

And again, on the right is a map of our city showing the geographic distributions of all of the locations and their programs.

Alright, now we're going to move, with our empowerment programs, we look at ways to help our patrons achieve their life goals.

This is also one of the pillars of our strategic plan.

This includes providing classes and workshops that help folks learn about things like resume essentials, get help job seeking or skill building, learn how to speak English or pursue citizenship, get adult tutoring support, get guidance on complex systems like estate planning, Medicare, and more.

We also provide one-on-one assistance to get tax help, start a business, learn about your family's history, and research Seattle's history, just to name a few.

Recently, our social services team and other library staff have helped host resource fairs at select locations, and I want to highlight in 2025 the library held resource fairs that provided free access to things like haircuts and clothing, bus tickets, social services referrals, healthy snacks, and more.

Many of these programs rely on support and expertise from community partners such as Evergreen Goodwill, Asian Counseling and Referral Services, Literacy Source, the United Way, AARP, and so, so many more.

In this slide, again, you can see a chart of the distribution of these empowerment programs across our systems as well as the audience, and our map shows, again, the geographic distributions of this offering.

All right, the next thing in our literacy enrichment and empowerment, with library programs, it truly takes a village.

We have 13 program managers who develop system-wide programs and our programming framework.

Librarians from across the system spend about 6% of their time supporting this work as well.

Of these programs, about 57 FTE are funded by the general fund, 38 FTE are funded by the levy, and 9 FTE are funded by private dollars.

Rob?

Actually, Rob, I think I'll have you take this one.

All right.

Thanks, Tom.

Just a quick intervention here from the Finance Guide.

This slide dives a bit deeper into the private funding.

So the Seattle Public Library Foundation provides direct support for program expenses and contributes funding for 12 partial or full programming positions.

and as you can see their contributions have increased both from their generosity as a foundation but also in response to community needs and the interests that have increased in this area and as Kay mentioned the general fund and the library fund or the library levy also support this work through library staffing hours but these sources do not provide direct funding which can be limiting to the scale of our offerings.

So we are really highly grateful and dependent on the supplemental funds from the foundation to expand these efforts and really build on the efforts of the library staff in the various locations.

Thank you, Rob.

And I just want to thank the foundation Brian Lawrence, you're here today and board member who spoke during public comment.

Really want to thank you for the support of the library It takes a village.

We're all working together to really support our libraries and in turn support our library patrons and I really appreciate all the work of the foundation as we move forward.

We pull from all sources and we really appreciate that and including private funding from some patrons as well, which is where the foundation gets its funding to be able to lend to the effort.

Thank you to all of our residents who have given money to the foundation to help with these wonderful efforts at the library.

And as we leave this conversation on hours and access, I want to ask about Seattle Reads, the book of the year.

We haven't heard that yet.

I don't know when that comes out, but I always look forward to it.

We will be hearing about that soon, although we have something that is a little in front of that.

And I'll have Kay remind me again, she's been managing part of this, but one evening I was chatting with some colleagues and one from LA County Public Library, and she had an idea of, can we get a one book, one coast?

And I said, well, why not?

and she said, you jump in on that?

I said, yeah.

I said, you do know that we started the whole one book program, right?

And she's like, no.

I'm like, well, let me educate you.

And anyway, she is great, Dr. Sky Patrick at LA County Public and her team.

have been working with libraries all up and down the West Coast.

And I believe, Kay, we're up to a thousand libraries participating up and down the coast.

So it's an exciting time and I'll let you give them a sense of the book.

Yes, this is super exciting.

Thank you, Tom.

And so we are going to be joining hundreds of libraries across the West Coast, and we will be reading They Called Us Enemy by George Takai.

We will have a news release coming out, ooh, it might be today, if not this week, with more information.

It will include programming as well as a virtual author talk with George Takai.

That is awesome.

I'm glad I asked about Seattle Reads.

Well, my comms and marketing team might be talking to me when I return, but you got the scoop.

We got the scoop.

No worries.

No one's watching.

The five people that might be watching on Seattle Channel, I'm just kidding.

It might be more than that, but we'll keep it amongst us.

Folks watching, keep it amongst us.

Alright, well thank you and thank you for that question.

Those are the fun things for sure that we get to participate in.

When it comes to the hours and access, the services provided by Larry funding, patrons tell us they enjoy our spaces as a third place away from home and work, the access to our collections and services make their lives more affordable, and our programs are enriching and empowering and helping them build confidence in their lives.

As we look at opportunities, potential levy investments in a 2026 library renewal could provide the opportunity to scale the programs as we've mentioned here citywide.

And it's important to note that the library and staff who help manage our programs are the same people and staff who are keeping our doors open, providing support to answer patron questions, checking out books, answering phones, preparing meeting rooms and so much more.

We believe the valuable programming work the library has provided the community for many years is deserving of additional direct investment.

We also see the opportunity in new spaces and uses within our libraries.

Many other systems across the nation have introduced maker spaces, media centers, and other new uses of library space that attract new patrons of other generations.

We see potential for this as well, but such changes we know will require additional investment.

Thank you.

Sorry to interrupt you, Chief.

Council President has a question.

I think somehow she fell.

Our technology's not working to keep her on.

She sort of fell off.

We're trying to get her back because I know she has a question.

Okay.

So if you give us one minute, so sorry.

Absolutely.

Council President, if you can hear us, we'll try to get you back on and get your question answered.

We'll continue, Chief.

Thank you.

Thank you.

So this next area, Helping Children, is a bucket in the levy, and this is our final levy category to cover in our presentation.

And Helping Children was a new category created by City Council in the 2019 Library Levy to provide dedicated funding for one program in particular.

and this program is Kaleidoscope Play and Learn.

This supports children's parents and caregivers in developing a love of reading at a young age, prioritize communities most impacted by systemic barriers, support school readiness, language development, and social skills.

These are weekly 90-minute guided play sessions held at seven library locations across the city and offered in multiple languages.

In this slide, you can see the locations.

in which these are offered.

We have nearly 300 play and learn sessions each year across the following locations, Beacon Hill, Columbia, Del Ridge, New Holly, Rainier Beach, and South Park.

We have about 7,000 participants of this program.

Patron surveys show high satisfaction with the program.

83% of parents and caregivers say the program helped them understand the kinds of activities that will support their child with school readiness.

Our current offerings throughout the city reflect partners in the region with capacity to operate the program, alignment with prioritized communities in the library's 10-year strategic plan, and a capacity of the library location that hosts the program.

The program often provides an early learning opportunity in a community where no other opportunity exists.

This was particularly true in Southwest Seattle when a King County grant that helped support PlanLearn program partners ended in 2022. Our library staff worked with the city and the foundation partners to increase funding support, and thanks to that support we were able to step in and help in that region, expanding our coverage to Delridge, New Holly, and South Park.

Thank you, Chief.

I have a question, but I see now Council President is on.

Council President, did you have a question?

So sorry.

Oh, is she still there?

No, I did not have a question.

Thank you so much.

Okay, sorry about that.

I thought you had your hand up earlier.

Chief, I do have a question about this in terms of your partnership with the Department of Education and Early Learning.

I know that we've put this really big focus on early learning via our childcare and preschool program, our award-winning preschool program that we're very proud of.

And so I know that kids are getting early learning through those avenues.

So when you say these are kids that weren't getting it, I'm a little confused by that.

So can you expand on that and expand upon your relationship with DEAL?

I can to some extent, I might have to provide a little bit more to you later, but in this particular case with this program, as it was initially contemplated by council all the way back in 2019, it really was looking at areas of the city that at the time Deal did not have programs in.

Schools maybe were quite a bit of distance from places that kids lived that needed some of these resources or families needed.

And so this was an opportunity at that time to have these opportunities available for families that would not normally have access to this.

As we have continued to provide this support, DEAL is aware of these programs as well.

We make sure that they know which programs are running and we have a good idea of what they're running as well.

And these are still in areas where we see folks coming to us that, again, are maybe coming in through the library and then seeking resource and these offerings are available to them in language.

You can see in this next slide how many languages are offered and what we're seeing as a percentage.

So we know these are serving folks who often may not get the traditional information.

because it's not in language.

We do a lot of work in our locations to make sure that we have these services or opportunities available in language so that they can actually see it when they walk into a location, which is really key in making sure we're serving these families.

Thank you for that, Chief.

And I will follow up with you and Director Chappell so that we are well coordinated.

This is a need.

I actually, as someone who learned English in kindergarten and first grade, I understand the importance of these types of supports for our kids in the city.

I fully support it and I wanna make sure though that we're leveraging our investments and that we are coordinated as we're doing these efforts, particularly because as a public agent, you know, as government, a public entity, you know, we have limited resources for all the things that we do and we want to make sure that we're well coordinated.

So I'll follow up on that.

Thank you.

Yeah, and I think here again it's important to note that many of these, again, it's multilingual offerings, but in many cases you may have English and the language spoken.

So families, in many cases even in our world story times, adults are learning English at the same time as the children.

It's also a great way for people to bond over reading.

So we find these valuable, as do the patrons who obviously participate.

Absolutely chief.

I just want to make sure that we are well coordinated as I said and that what would that we know right hand left hand knows what we're doing and then sometimes when we do that then we're able to identify Either a shift to a different way as you said in 2019 this was identified Given all of the FEP levy investments.

I don't know if the need is is exactly in these areas or in this way.

And so we just want to make sure we're always coordinating with our sister departments so that we are bringing the best to all our patrons across the city, including our kids and our families, where English might be a second language.

As I said, that is personal to me as someone who benefited growing up from supports.

I needed that.

I didn't know English, so thank you.

Agreed, thank you.

And I'll turn this over to Rob for this next portion.

Thanks, Tom.

So this is the sixth of these bar chart slides that shows the portion of the levy that is in the category of helping children.

And as you can see quite clearly, this is the smallest investment by levy category.

As Tom noted, in 2023, funding from a King County program was no longer available.

so the library looked to increase its resource.

And then due to the positive outcomes of the program and the support of the city and the foundation, the library was able to pick up more of the cost of this program to carry on the good work in early literacy for Seattle families.

This slide depicts, as others have, the portion of the levy compared to the general fund and private resources.

The helping children category is the only category primarily funded by private dollars.

This next slide shows the breakdown year over year of how those dollars are apportioned against the three different funding types.

and I'll turn it back to Kay.

Oh, I'm sorry, I'm turning it back to Tom.

Well, yes, yes, that is me on this one.

So we'll talk, as we shared in the hours and access portion, levy dollars help support library staffing needs, which helps support our other children's programs too.

So the ones that are obviously most noted are story times.

In 2025, we hosted over 1,100 story times.

and drew a total attendance of 42,000.

This includes world language storytimes offered in English, Arabic, Spanish, and Mandarin.

We had a program called Raising a Reader, which is a parent engagement initiative designed to cultivate a love of reading and strengthen a parent-child interaction related to reading.

Each week children bring home a red bag with multicultural and developmentally appropriate books to enjoy.

Families receive support for book sharing and developing skills to support reading readiness.

Outreach programs that occur in community partner preschool and childcare sites.

Over 1400 young children participate ranging from 10 months to 9 years.

A new program that we are piloting is one called Story Squad.

The Levy Supportive Collections helped us start this pilot.

It's a new early literacy program with Seattle Public Schools.

The library purchases and delivers classroom sets of books for grades two through four to Title I schools.

We started in one school and the second grade.

We will evaluate this and expand it in 2026. This was developed at the request over a number of years with Seattle Public Schools.

Materials in the classroom sets are curated based on topics and themes teachers have expressed interest in for their classes.

Teachers have requested things that coordinate with curriculum as well as using these kits as prizes for students.

And I see here, Chief, that you have on the Raising a Reader, you hold it in settings such as childcare centers and Seattle preschool programs, so I see there's that collaboration with Deal.

Absolutely.

I want to make sure that is as robust a collaboration as possible.

and it's probably happening and then we don't get to hear about it.

So I wanna make sure that we and more importantly the public knows about all the things that are happening and that these are collaborations because I understand most of this is funding that's coming from the foundation in terms of the program but library staffing that is gonna be funded.

This is another one of those partnerships lends the staff to it.

Absolutely, thank you for that.

All right, we are in a home stretch.

We're gonna dig in a little more about our story times.

This is a map of the geographic distribution of our story times included at our libraries and our offsite locations.

On the right in the chart, you can see the locations and the language served.

These locations are determined by assessing criteria such as the city's RSJ and demographic map.

the schools in the area, for example, if there are Title I schools, attendance and opportunities for similar services in the area, as well as feedback and requests.

This table specifically looks at our offsite partnerships where we held storytimes outside of our buildings in 2025. As you can see, we provided storytimes at a variety of locations that include over 100 storytimes at Head Start schools, like we do many of our Seattle public schools and at 33 preschools across the city.

I think Council Member Foster, did you have a hand up?

I do, thank you chair.

It's actually from a few slides back.

I think it was slide 48. Okay, first of all, I love Storytime.

Just love it so much.

Took my kid there a ton, so thank you for that work.

We had like a super strong relationship with our librarian from Storytime, so anyway.

But my question is about StorySquad.

Can you just tell us a little bit more why Bailey Gatzert was selected?

And then Chief, you mentioned that you'd be doing an evaluation of the program, and can you just tell us a little bit more about what you're looking at as you're considering potentially scaling this?

Yeah, I'll ask Kay to address that.

She's managing that.

Okay, thank you.

Yeah, definitely.

Bailey Gatzer was selected because it was a Title I school and we had strong participation from the teachers and the principal, and so we felt that it was a solid choice for a pilot program to get our teachers and our principals who were very interested in this to get a lot more feedback on seeing how we could make this feasible and scalable throughout the system.

Got it.

And then I heard you say you're evaluating it this year.

Is that correct?

That is correct.

We just started sending out our kits and so we're looking at getting, we are getting feedback from the first semester that we had and iterating on that feedback to see how we can make improvements.

Got it.

And do we anticipate being able to hear more information prior to Levy going forward this year?

I just, I know our schools need a ton of support and our students need a ton of support and and unfortunately there's cuts coming left, right and center.

And so this feels really important to make sure that books are making their way into the classroom.

Yes, and you will hear more about it for sure as we proceed with the levy renewal.

That'll be something we'll be bringing to the table.

I've been here 11 years now and through that time the school system has been, you know, the one thing they always ask for is that material, right?

We know the libraries and schools are, some are very well supported if you have a PTO, PTA, any of the other acronyms.

In some cases that's great and then we have great loss of library and library staff in some schools.

So over all these years, as we've gone back and forth in this, you know, there has been this, well, how do, you know, we have the worry about material going lost.

Are you gifting public funds and doing that?

And I'm like, well, we have things, you know, people don't bring back.

We go through a process.

But at the end of the day, kids are gonna have these books in the classroom, right?

If one goes home, it'll probably come back, right?

We know that.

And I think trying to remove those barriers to those physical books are so important, especially at a young age.

Electronic material is great.

There are some things you can do with some of the new technologies and books that are out there, but at the end of the day, it's the tactile experience that's really important.

It's also really important that it resonates with a kid.

Do they see people who look like them?

Do they see something that really interests them?

Whatever the subject or topic is.

And that may or may not be available in your library.

And so it's something we really have put a lot of thought in to how we can better support the schools with material.

That's our strong suit.

I can buy probably, well I probably buy a lot more than they do.

at a different rate and I think those are all things that help as we try to make sure that we're providing the best for our students and their success.

Thank you so much.

I really look forward to hearing more about this in particular so we can make sure we're supporting those Title I schools.

And just a comment while we're on this about book access.

I also love the yellow stickers.

I don't know what that's actually called.

If you're in the library, there's some books that have the yellow stickers in the kids section and they don't have to check them out.

They can just kind of grab them and take them and bring them back whenever.

And so again, I just want to commend you guys for the ways that you're being responsive to the ways that kids read and access books.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, Councilmember Foster.

Did I hear you say, Chief, that some of the Seattle Public Schools don't have libraries, or did I misunderstand that?

No, they have a library space, most of them.

They vary in size, they vary in the collection and the amount of material they have.

And also, some things are well-loved and well-used and not easily replaced with smaller school but library budgets.

Got it.

Thank you.

Thanks for the clarification there.

Thank you so much.

And I do want to add with a story squad, we were able to create a formal MOU with SPS.

This is the first time that we've had the organizational MOU with both entities, which is really exciting and also offers additional ways that we're able to partner more easily.

so I get to talk about really wonderful things and so we have some feedback from our patrons in regards to our early literacy programs that they attend.

When it comes to the Levy funded Kaleidoscope Play and Learn program, participants tell us that they're making close family and community connections.

They feel they're more prepared for their child's first day of school and they feel supported and accepted.

I just want to see this joy on this last photo of our slide.

We see so much opportunity in this levy category to increase our community access to programs that support children, youth and teen, as well as their families.

Many of our community family story times fill our largest meeting spaces.

Parents express great interest in expansion of programs like these, and we also see a really great opportunity to improve community literacy outcomes, which is an important goal of the library's 10-year strategic plan.

And with that, that concludes our presentation.

Thank you, Chief.

Thank you, Kay.

You have a great job.

I do.

I am so lucky.

Thank you, Chair.

These are some really amazing programs that benefit kids and adults across the city.

And it is in partnership with the Foundation.

I'm going to keep going to that.

And with all the patrons that give the money for it, it's really a great collaboration all these programs and it's something that really brings not just literacy but a lot of joy to a lot of folks because I know Storytime is so great for the kids.

I'm a parent, so I know I've taken my kids as well.

And I particularly wanna give a little note here where you have a firefighter story time.

Is that where you bring a firefighter to read a book?

Oh, it is.

And these are some of our most popular story times.

I will say we have, I think one coming up at the end of this week and they are starting again in March.

So if you have children, be prepared.

The firefighters are coming.

I love it.

Do they bring the big red engines?

Oh, yes.

See, I love it.

Stickers, all the gear.

Love, love, love that.

So wanted to give a shout out to the firefighters I'm a big fan of all the work that they do.

They do so much in community and they also provide alternative response also as we were talking about social services earlier.

So they're a great partner there as well.

All right, colleagues, we have come to the end of the presentation but not the questions.

Council Member Foster, I see you.

Have your hand up, you are recognized.

My last one, Chair, thank you.

Don't worry, sweet.

Thank you so much.

And can I just ask you to speak a little bit more to your teen programming?

I heard you say that a bit in the summary, but I know we were focusing more.

I heard the homework help, which I think is teen-oriented.

Are there other things that you wanna just bring up on our radar?

I mean, our young people just deserve so much support and that you guys provide a ton of it.

I wanna make sure I've got the fullest picture of it.

Definitely.

Thank you so much Council Member Foster.

I want to give a huge shout out to our teen librarians.

They are a small team at SPL and they do amazing work.

We have a really fantastic teen services program manager as well.

So we are doing things like resource fairs.

YARF is one of the most popular things that we have and it's annually it's the young adult resource fair which is the best acronym ever and we also have things like learning buddies where we offer internship opportunities and we also are engaging in programs for all of our teens as we look towards the summer we are looking to refresh our summer program because after 107 years we want to change it up a little bit and so we are looking to have all ages so teen youth and adult will have a track that they would be able to follow during the summer.

So those are just a few.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Councilmember Foster, anything else?

Okay.

Just wanted to make sure.

Councilmember Lynn?

I just want to follow up on that.

Are there for teens either internship paid or unpaid or volunteer opportunities?

Could you give a status of that or how that looks like as the summer is approaching?

Yes, thank you, Council Member Lynn.

We have a few different opportunities.

Again, we have Learning Buddies, which is an internship program that we partner with other organizations to help bring folks, young folks on for that experience.

We also, I actually have a meeting today with the Boys and Girls Club club to get more information on partnerships and internship opportunities that they have and would like to partner with us.

And we are currently doing a refresh of our student assistant or our STA program.

This is a fabulous program where we have managers, supervisors, assistant directors who have come up as student assistants through the program and are running our library system now.

So we are very excited to have a refresh of that and refocusing on how we're creating those career paths and ways to have folks traditionally who have not been represented within the library system or within the library school world to have better access and a career path to move up through the library.

Thank you and just one follow-up.

I'm not sure if you work very closely with Team Read.

They oftentimes employ sort of older students to read with the younger students and I'm not sure if they do that at any of your locations or if there's a

Yes, thank you so much.

That's actually one of our partners.

So annually we do work with Teen Read as well.

Okay, thank you.

Yes, thank you.

Thank you Councilmember Lynn and thank you Kay for that.

I also want to say for teen related, I know we have the Summer Youth Employment Program that's out of HSD and I look forward to hearing about that program for this year.

It's really critical.

I know when I was growing up in New York City, I was a crew chief for our Summer Youth Employment Program in New York.

so I saw firsthand how important it is to the teens on multiple fronts and so thank you for raising the question, Council Member Foster, about teen activities basically and look forward to hearing from HSD on that, hopefully at some point.

I don't sit on the committee but I hope to find out about it.

All right, colleagues, any other questions?

I don't see anyone else's hand up.

So I will just say thank you again for the presentation today and last week.

It was two long presentations by design.

It really was to show our work.

As you can hear, there is a lot going on at Seattle Public Libraries and both slide decks were focused on the levy.

there was some overlap with some of the supports we get from the Foundation and from General Fund but really the point of last week and this week was to show you all colleagues and the public how our levy dollars are at work in a very in-depth deep dive way.

I think that is important.

There's so much happening and so much to be proud of with this levy investment and I thought it was really important to show that work.

So thank you for all that you did to create all of these slides.

all of your team members were involved I want to thank my team for working with your team to make sure that we had all the information to really show in a very robust way what the 2019 levy went to fund and we didn't focus a lot on this but I do want to mention that since the levy we past we did have the pandemic and we also had the ransomware attack and that had a huge impact on the libraries in 2024. It took some time and at the time I expressed gratitude, I will express gratitude again to you Chief Fay and to your staff for all that you did in response to that attack and having to get everything back on track and in line.

and a compliment that you can see colleagues from last week's presentation and this week's presentation that despite all of that, the library served across the city all its patrons in this very robust way.

We're grateful for the levy and for the foundation for that matter and for all the patrons that support it.

We were able to do a lot since 2019, since this levy passed to really support our patrons across the city.

So thank you for that.

Please thank your team.

For me, there's a big team that you have at the libraries.

How many again?

Nearly 700.

700 library staff that support Seattle Public Libraries and we are so grateful to them for all their work.

Thank you again.

Let me get to the final part of my script here.

All right, colleagues, any further questions or comments?

Seeing no further questions, this concludes the February 25th meeting of the Library's Education and Neighborhoods Committee.

Our next committee meeting is scheduled for Wednesday, March 11th at 9.30 a.m.

If there's no further business, this meeting will adjourn.

Hearing no further business, it's 11.23 a.m.

and this meeting is adjourned.

Thank you colleagues.