Photo by Victoria Hernandez.
The council chambers in City Hall were bustling Tuesday morning with folks donning pieces of red to show support for our libraries.
The meeting marked the first presentation to council members of the Quality of Life, Arts and Cultural Committee since four Dallas Public Library branches were selected for potential closure. Those branches are the Oak Lawn Branch, the Skyline Branch, the Renner Frankford Branch and the Arcadia Park Branch.
The closures come as part of the Library Regional Model plan for the Dallas Public Library system, saving an estimated $4.5 million over two years. This plan is to comply with the adoption of the 2025-26 Fiscal Year Budget, where it states that DPL develops “a regional service model with expanded offerings at select branches,” along with “undertaking a comprehensive review of the Central Library.” Following this evaluation, the City plans to move to a regional model for DPL in 2027.
Library Director Manya Shorr briefed the committee with Chief Data Officer Dr. Brita Andercheck from the Office of Data Analytics and Business Intelligence.
The two organizations collaborated to come up with this first recommendation, focusing strictly on data to have an unbiased process in order to recommend closures with the idea that community input would come later, Shorr said.
The current recommendations are made up of a three element model: community need (median household income, population of high school completion, population under 5 years old), library usage (checkouts, computer sessions, programs, program attendance) and library coverage (reachability within a 15-minute drive for residents, square footage of the branch). These three elements were evaluated based on the existing library region map, placing Oak Cliff in two out of the seven regions: West and Southwest.
For the West region, the four libraries within those boundaries are the Hampton-Illinois Branch, the North Oak Cliff Branch (which was voter-approved to receive 2024 bond funding), the Arcadia Park Branch and Dallas West. Hampton-Illinois was selected as a flagship library, meaning that the facility “will provide expanded hours and deeper and more impactful programs and services,” Shorr said.
The Arcadia Park Branch, one of the four recommended for closure, is connected to the Arcadia Park Elementary School and has a community partnership with Dallas ISD.
Currently, no libraries in the Southwest region are recommended as flagships or for closure.
“The regional model will allow us to offer services when residents need them the most, which is something we struggle to achieve now,” Shorr said. “And it will condense our highest impact services into five flagship locations with a plan to add additional flagships in future years.”
District 6 City Council member Laura Cadena raised concerns about the potential closure of the Arcadia Park Branch, highlighting the lack of consideration for the history of a library to the community before a recommendation.
“There’s some things that data cannot capture. There’s these stories and history for these libraries. They’re cultural centers,” she said. “And so, I mean, it feels like that is missing from this.”
District 3 City Council member Zarin Gracey also mentioned the lack of community engagement, adding the issue that public input often comes after recommendations are brought to the council. Community feedback is a part of the next steps for the model.
“The other piece that was missed was us,” he said in reference to the committee. “We all found out about this on social media from one way or another. That should’ve never happened. As the chair, that should have never happened. That right there is a huge problem.”
Update: Dallas Public Library released a statement that they will reschedule the community meetings originally planned for late January and early February at a later date.
