Labor / Governance

You Can't Run a Library Like a Business

Businesses count widgets, not life events. So why are healthy libraries cutting staff to look lean?

By Sam Chada Filed — June 2026 12 min

The buyout email landed in more than 250 inboxes one day in May 2026, full-timers and part-timers alike at the Salt Lake City Public Library. The offer was generous on paper: a maximum of 20 weeks of base pay, payouts for accrued leave, and up to 12 months of continued health insurance for anyone who took the deal and walked out the door by June 27.

The stated reason was almost soothing. The buyouts would "minimize the potential need for involuntary layoffs or separations in the future," the library said, with "no near-term plans regarding any layoffs." Then at a staff town hall, managers said the quiet part: they hoped it would produce "a leaner library staff over time." Staff described an element of shock. One called the mood "terrified."

Here is the part that does not add up. There is no budget crisis. Recent budget presentations to the City Council made no mention of upcoming staffing cuts. The money is not shrinking, it is growing: the FY2026 proposed general fund budget runs about $43.2 million, up roughly 18.9 percent year over year, and the system is about 95 percent property-tax funded. The offer came less than three months after the library's workers unionized, their first contract winning final City Council approval in February 2026. CEO Noah Baskett called it "long-term financial stewardship and organizational planning" and said it was unrelated to the union.

So here is the puzzle. A library with almost 19 percent more money than last year just asked its own people to please consider leaving. What kind of math gets you there?

Businesses count widgets. Libraries count life events. That is the whole difference, and almost everything else follows from it.

A business measures the product: sales, margin, retention, cost per unit. The customer is a means to that number. A library measures the person. What changed in a life, and in a community. The kid who learned to read. The laid-off worker who landed the job from the resume class. The senior who was not alone on a Tuesday. The patron who finally found the health information that mattered. There is no revenue downstream that those outcomes serve. The outcome is the bottom line. The public is the shareholder, and the dividend gets paid in lives, not dollars.

Watch what happens to a single phrase. "Do more with less." A business tightens to extract more revenue with less. A library tightens to deliver more outcomes with less. Same words, opposite meanings.

A business optimizes by shedding its unprofitable customers. A library's entire purpose is the unprofitable customer. The unhoused patron. The kid with no wifi at home. The person who needs an hour of a librarian's time and checks out nothing. Run that institution like a business, and the math tells you to fire your reason for existing.

Here is how the trap snaps shut. Import business measurement and you can only count what business counts: transactions, headcount, cost per use. Outcomes are slow and human and almost impossible to put on a dashboard, so they quietly drop off the spreadsheet. Once outcomes are invisible, the people who deliver them, the folks at the desk, start to look like pure overhead. That is why "run it like a business" always, always ends with cutting the desk.

There are two ways to gut a library. You can starve it from the outside, or you can optimize it from the inside. One is done to libraries. The other, libraries do to themselves.

The first way: starve it.

Start with the honest cuts. Someone with a name decided to spend less on libraries, said so out loud, and the libraries fought back in the open. Federal, then state, then local.

In March 2025, Executive Order 14238 ordered the Institute of Museum and Library Services eliminated "to the maximum extent of the law". IMLS is the only federal agency dedicated to library funding. Signed March 14, 2025.

The clearest casualty showed up fast. The Maine State Library issued layoff notices to 13 employees, about 30 percent of its staff, citing the lost IMLS money directly. IMLS dollars were about 30 percent of its budget, and its FY2024 award was $1,526,754. After a partial funding restoration, the damage came down to a net 8: three layoffs rescinded, two more avoided by reassignment. Still a third of a state library, gutted on a signature.

Then the states. Ohio's 2025 budget, House Bill 96, converted the Public Library Fund from a fixed percentage of the state general revenue fund into a flat line item. That sounds like accounting. It is a roughly $25 million statewide cut from fiscal 2025 to 2026: the fund closed FY2025 at about $504.6 million, and libraries see about $479.7 million in FY2026.

You can watch the boards absorb it. On June 24, 2025, Dayton Metro Library approved a voluntary retirement incentive, citing the anticipated state cuts and that exact line-item conversion. Up in the northwest corner, Toledo Lucas County Public Library said it might have to eliminate about 24 positions, facing a $1.6 million state cut over two years on top of an existing $2.8 million deficit. Those cuts are not finalized. What is finalized: on August 14, 2025, its board voted to close the Toledo Heights branch and cut hours at others.

And then the local cliff, the one that did not need an executive order at all. La Crosse Public Library in Wisconsin faced a $174,705 gap in its FY2026 operating budget from a reduced city allocation, partly because the one-time federal pandemic relief, ARPA money, ran out. It chose to eliminate two vacant full-time positions and redistribute the work rather than lay off people in filled roles.

Brutal, all of it. But honest. There is a funder you can name. There is a vote you can show up to. There is a fight you can have in public, in front of a board, with the numbers on the table. Every one of these libraries is still trying to do more with less, in the service of the people who walk through the door. They got smaller because someone made them smaller, and they said so.

The second way is quieter. It happens when nobody is forcing the library's hand at all.

The second way: optimize it.

Nobody made these libraries do this. No levy failed. No state pulled a check. The library looked at itself, decided it was carrying too much, and started cutting anyway. That is the quieter cut, and it is the one that should scare you, because it means the corporate logic is no longer something done TO libraries. It is something libraries now do to themselves.

Start with Timberland Regional Library in Washington, because the receipts are loud. In early 2026, TRL handed layoff notices to 61 frontline workers, 44 involuntary and 17 voluntary, which the union pegged at about 38 percent of frontline staff. To be fair: TRL had a real money problem. The library faced a multi-year deficit projected at about negative $3.8 million for 2026 (Chinook Observer). A library can be genuinely broke.

But look at what TRL did during that same stretch. Executive director Cheryl Heywood's salary went from $155,000 in 2023 to $206,788 in 2025. A brand-new position called "Employee Experiences Advisor" was created in 2025 at $120,376. An administrative coordinator was retitled "Executive Administrator" and rose to $133,760. And a new "Special Projects Coordinator" was added for 2026 at $105,847 (same Chinook Observer reporting). While the desk was getting cut, the suite was getting raises and three fresh six-figure chairs.

The fallout was not subtle. Heywood resigned, and the board accepted it on March 27, 2026, after a performance-evaluation session. Eight former trustees sent a letter demanding an audit for possible misfeasance (The Chronicle). After union pressure, about 80 percent of the involuntary layoffs, 36 of the 44, were rescinded (The Daily World).

The honest read: TRL had a real deficit AND grew its executive tier in the very same window. A genuine budget hole explains belt-tightening. It does not explain raises and new six-figure admin roles handed out while frontline workers got layoff notices. That gap is the extraction reflex in its purest form: cut the desk, protect the suite.

And the reversal saved the jobs, not the service. By the time the workers won their 80 percent back, Timberland had already cut roughly 37 percent of its materials budget and trimmed hours at seventeen of its twenty-nine branches, in a system that already circulated fewer items per resident than any comparable library in the state. None of that came back. A library facing a real shortfall chose to buy even fewer books. And the administrators who built that budget did not wear it well: internal chat logs from a budget workshop, made public in May, caught the operations director telling a trustee to "stfu" and complaining that another trustee had reported the library's finances to the state auditor. She was out within days, and the finance administrator beside her in those messages resigned weeks later.

Now go back to where this started, Salt Lake City. Read against TRL, the buyout offer stops looking like a mystery and starts looking like the same move with better manners. This is a financially healthy system. Its budget went up about 18.9 percent, and even granting that a single year's jump can carry one-time or restricted dollars, no levy failed and no funder pulled a check. The system restructured its leadership into a corporate C-suite. The chief executive officer running it, Noah Baskett, did not come from libraries. He arrived in early 2024 from nonprofit and community-development management in Tacoma, holds a master's in "Transformational Leadership," and relabeled the library's entire top tier into a six-officer suite: a CEO, a chief operations officer, a chief financial officer, a chief people officer, a chief service and impact officer, and a chief development officer. Then the library offered buyouts to thin its own ranks in the name of "organizational flexibility" and a "leaner library staff," with no funder forcing a single dollar of it, shortly after its workers unionized (Salt Lake Tribune). No deficit. No levy loss. Just a choice, made on the public record, to ask its own people to leave.

The contradiction sitting at the center of it: the same leader pitched this library, coming in, as "a platform for community and personal transformation," built around reaching marginalized and underserved residents. That is the right vision. It is also the most human-intensive work a library does, the hour with one patron that never lands on a dashboard. You do not get more of that from a leaner staff. The people are not the cost of that mission. They are how it happens.

And it crossed the border. This is not only an American habit. Kitchener Public Library in Ontario brought in a new CEO, Darren Solomon, in April 2024, from a background of "system-wide transformation" (KPL). He restructured the library, renaming departments into corporate-speak like "Customer Experience" and "People and Culture," over the objection of the workers' union, CUPE Local 331. The library says plainly that it is not facing any budget cuts (CBC). A library that admits it has no budget problem, reorganizing itself to sound like a software company.

Look at all three together. Timberland, Salt Lake City, Kitchener. Not one of them had a funder forcing its hand or demanding these specific cuts. They reached for the corporate playbook because they had already swallowed its core belief: that a leaner library is a better library, that fewer hands is efficiency, that an org chart full of "officers" is what competence looks like. That is the answer to the question I opened with. The math that gets you to "let's ask our own people to leave" is the math of widgets, run on a place that does not make widgets. It makes the room where a kid gets their first library card, where someone prints a resume after a layoff, where a new parent finds the board books. You cannot optimize that down without optimizing away the whole point.

Three libraries is an anecdote. Forty is a pattern.

Three cases prove nothing on their own. Pick any trend you want and you can find three libraries that fit it. So I went and counted.

I took the forty largest public library systems in the country, by population served, and looked up who ran each one in 2005, in 2015, and now. Not their politics, not their job performance. Just one plain, public fact about each: what the top job was called, and whether the person came up through libraries.

The title is the cleanest tell, because it is on the record and it does not hedge. A few of the very biggest systems have always carried corporate titles for legal reasons, the independent nonprofits and special districts like the New York Public Library, so set those aside. Watch instead the ordinary city and county libraries, the ones whose boss used to be a "city librarian" or a "director." Four of the forty largest have plainly converted that job into a corporate office since 2005: Brooklyn turned its "executive director" into a "president and CEO," Queens did the same to its "library director," Charlotte swapped its "library director" for a "CEO," and Los Angeles County bolted "CEO" onto its county librarian. Sacramento makes a borderline fifth, its director recently retitled "library director and CEO," though there the CEO label is partly a quirk of how the system is chartered. Count every system, including the three big outliers that have carried corporate-style titles all along for structural reasons, and the share of the forty biggest run by a "CEO" or a "president" went from three in 2005 to eight today, one in five. Either way you cut it, the line climbs.

The people behind the titles changed too. Twenty years ago, the rare outsider running a big library was a prestige hire, a celebrated academic brought in to front a flagship, like the French-literature scholar who ran the New York Public Library for nearly two decades. The outsiders arriving now are a different kind of hire. Columbus Metropolitan Library is run by a former chief financial officer with no library degree. Charlotte's system has been run on an interim basis by its own chief financial and administrative officer, a CPA. The training shifted from collections to cash.

There is one more thing the counting turned up. The job has gone national. Half of these forty libraries, twenty of them, hired their current leader away from a different system instead of promoting someone who came up inside the building. The clearest case is Kelvin Watson: chief operating officer at Queens, then director of Broward County in Florida, then executive director in Las Vegas, holding both a library degree and an MBA, and named Library Journal's librarian of the year. I want to be fair about this, because it cuts both ways. Librarians have always climbed by moving on, the same as school superintendents and city managers, and a traveling résumé is not damning by itself. Some of the movers are the profession's most decorated librarians. But it tells you what the chair has become. Less and less is it the town librarian who spent a career at one desk. More and more it is a portable executive post, filled from a national market, the way a company fills a vice presidency.

It is still a minority. Eight of forty is not a takeover, and most big libraries are still led by librarians who spent their careers on the floor. The point is the direction. Every count moved the same way, every decade, and it moved fastest at the very largest systems, the ones with the budgets and the boards big enough to hire whoever they please. Timberland, Salt Lake City, and Kitchener are not three strange exceptions. They are the leading edge of a line that has been climbing for twenty years.

And the language tends to be in place before the cuts, not after. A library does not usually rename its director "chief executive officer" the week it announces layoffs. The title and the org chart get redrawn earlier, when the new leader arrives, back when the budget still looks fine, so that by the time a buyout email lands in two hundred and fifty inboxes, the vocabulary has been sitting there a while. A corporate title is not a layoff, and plenty of CEO-titled libraries have cut nothing. The word does not predict the deed. It tells you which logic is in the room.

The counterforce, every time, is the people who do the work. The pushback in these stories did not come from a consultant or a strategic plan. It came from staff and their unions: AFSCME in Salt Lake City, the AFSCME local that represents workers at Timberland, CUPE at Kitchener. And it works. At Timberland, organized pressure got about 80 percent of the involuntary layoffs reversed. Not a memo. Not a polite letter to the board. People, together, refusing.

And some libraries never make their workers fight that fight at all. Spokane, in the same state as Timberland, faced the same kind of squeeze: a city in deficit, a decade of funding held flat while costs rose. Its public library absorbed the cut without laying anyone off. It held vacant positions open, shifted hours, drew down reserves, and dropped a streaming vendor instead of dropping people. No new C-suite, no buyout email, no front-office raises while the desk shrank. Its director put the whole difference in a sentence: "It takes staff to do the work we do. We're a very people-centric service." The honest footnote is that Spokane is buying time, not beating the math, its leaders say a failed levy in 2027 would force layoffs too. But handed the same pressure as Timberland, it made the opposite choice, and the choice is the tell. You can read what a library believes it is by what it protects when money is tight.

The point is not that every executive is a villain. Under civil-service rules a director often cannot choose who to lay off, and a buyout offered ahead of a forced reduction can be the most humane lever they have, the thing that spares the most junior children's librarian from getting bumped out by seniority. Plenty of "CEO" titles are just county pay classification, the only way to seat the library's head at parity with the other department heads who hold its budget. The tell is never the single title or the single offer. It is the pattern.

So here is the useful part. You do not have to wait for the buyout email to land in your inbox to know it is coming. The corporate playbook has tells, and once you have seen them you cannot unsee them.

Watch for these:

And if every one of those tells gets waved through, there is a final form: hand the library to an actual company. Dozens of American towns have done it, contracting a private-equity-owned firm to run their public libraries for a fee, the model that strips the union, drops the pensions, and books the savings. The two most-watched towns that tried it, Santa Clarita and Jackson County, Oregon, both eventually took their libraries back into public hands, one of them finding it cost less to simply run the thing itself. Even the end of the road has a way back, and it runs through exactly the people the whole playbook is built to remove.

A business asks how few people it takes to move the product out the door. A library should be asking how many lives it can change before close. Those are not the same question, and you can tell which one your library is actually answering by looking at who it just let go.

Sources

Federal / IMLS:

Ohio (House Bill 96 and the Public Library Fund):

La Crosse (the ARPA cliff):

Salt Lake City:

Timberland (WA):

Kitchener (Ontario):

The twenty-year trend (my own count of the forty largest US systems, 2005/2015/2025; leadership receipts):

I'm not a writer and I don't pretend to be. This piece was co-written with AI. I've used Grammarly for a decade. This is the same deal, just faster. My integrity is on the line, not the machine's, and I'm not letting AI take that from me. More on how I work.