The Dallas City Council voted to tentatively save the Skillman Southwestern Branch Library at a budget workshop earlier this week.
Photo by Aysia Lane.
The library had been identified for closure as part of cost-cutting measures in City Manager Kimberly Bizor Tolbert’s initial draft budget for FY 2025-26. Its closure was expected to save the City $485,486. However, council members cast nonbinding votes in favor of reallocating $386,616 in American Rescue Plan Act funds to keep the branch open at Wednesday’s budget meeting.
District 9 council member Paula Blackmon submitted the budget amendment, which was approved by a 10-5 straw vote. District 10 council member Kathy Stewart was among those who voted in its favor. The amendment will keep the library open three days a week, a reduction from its current five-day schedule.
“I’m struggling with this one because I’m a huge supporter of libraries and feel like a library in a neighborhood, at least in my experience, it’s like having a piece of city hall there. It’s what connects you to the city in a lot of ways,” Stewart said. “It’s where you vote. I’ve been to lots of community meetings and town hall meetings, and so it’s hard to close one.”
Skillman Southwestern was originally slated to close after last year’s budgetary process, but was saved after considerable resident outcry. The 13,200 square-foot library, which opened in 1996, was picked for shutdown due to comparatively lower usage rates and proximity to the newly-opened Vickery Park Branch Library, with similar reasons given for Skillman Southwestern’s closure this year.
At the briefing, Dallas Public Library Director Manya Shorr said while the branch’s checkout and visitor numbers are not among the lowest in the DPL system, program and adult education utilization rates were factored into the decision.
“It’s only when you factor in everything else that it becomes clear why a small, poorly designed library like Skillman would be put on the list to be decommissioned,” Shorr said at the meeting. “And then you layer on the fact that there’s already what I would consider a regional library very close by in Vickery Park, which is our only library that’s currently open seven days a week.”
The move comes as part of Tolbert’s push to move the library system to a “regional” model in response to evolving neighbor usage patterns and rising costs. As described by DPL staff, the model would move the library system away from neighborhood-centric branch libraries and toward regional campuses open seven days a week.
In addition to the Skillman Southwestern branch in the coming fiscal year, four branch libraries would shutter in the following fiscal year as part of the plan. The Vickery Park Branch has repeatedly been cited as an example of what a regional library might look like.
At the meeting, Blackmon said that she would like Skillman Southwestern to remain open for at least one more year so it can be a part of the regional model discussion expected to take place before next year’s budget is adopted.
“I really would love to have it for a whole year, or at least till the process happens and we decide on a new model,” Blackmon said. {And given that we don’t have a good track record (closing buildings), I think it is a good strategy, given that it’s $386,000 and until we can figure out the whole system and have that part of the discussion as well.”
The $386,616 to be reallocated under the proposal would come from an ARPA-funded septic program to connect homes to the City’s water system. Targeted to underserved communities mostly in southern Dallas, only 23 homeowners had signed up for the program to date, city staff said.
District 12 council member Cara Mendelsohn was one of five votes against the proposal. At the meeting, Mendelsohn expressed fear for the future of the program with limited funding and opposition to moving funds from southern Dallas to a relatively wealthier area.
“If we use this money for this, I don’t expect to have this come back again, because, literally, you’re taking money that’s designated for the South and moving to keep open a library that everyone can obviously see should not stay open when it is one mile from a seven day a week library,” Mendelsohn said.
The City Council will next meet on Sept. 10, with the budget slated to be adopted at a Sept. 17 meeting.
