City Council Seeks ‘Out of the Box’ Solutions to Prevent Public Library Closures

Four libraries may be safe after Dallas City Council members directed library staff to pursue a proposal to keep all neighborhood branches open.

In January, library staff announced a plan to close the Oak Lawn, Skyline, Arcadia Park, and Renner-Frankford branch libraries as part of a shift to a regional model centered on expanded offerings at new flagship branches. At a meeting of the Quality of Life, Arts and Culture Committee, council members pushed back on the plans and asked Dallas Public Library Director Manya Shorr to bring back proposals to keep all branches open.

Shorr presented those options to the committee on Monday, with council members almost entirely supporting a proposal to pursue the creation of flagship branches while keeping all 28 neighborhood libraries open.

“Shame on us if we can’t find the $2 million your department needs to keep operating,” Council member Chad West told Shorr, who also pointed out that the city is expected to have a $5.4 billion budget next year.

Flagships would be open for longer hours and offer expanded programming, including GED courses, citizenship classes and English-language learning programs.

“The flagship models, I think, are interesting, but my primary concern is keeping the branches intact,” said West.

The library system has been asked to identify $2.6 million in savings ahead of the next fiscal year, up from $1.9 million in cuts made last year. Dallas officials are expecting another difficult budgetary cycle, with state-imposed caps on tax revenue and on payments to the beleaguered police and fire pension system likely to constrain resources available for general fund departments like the DPL.

Shorr’s presentation included results from a Friends of the Dallas Public Library survey that showed nearly 74% of respondents opposed the closures.

“We have to entertain and explore different ways to be efficient and run our government in ways that cut dollars and sometimes services,” Deputy Mayor Pro Tem Gay Donnell Willis said at the meeting. “It just depends on what the equation is each year, and there are a lot of external factors, but the more this has been coming before us, the more I’m arriving at a place where we need to find this money.

Critics of the plan have stressed the importance of the branches selected for closure and questioned the criteria used to determine which libraries would be phased out under a Regional Model. The plan presented in January did not include information on branches’ proximity to city resources, cultural significance or other factors such as voting center utilization.

According to Dallas County Elections data, more early votes were cast at the Oak Lawn library during the March primary races than at all but two other voting centers in the county. 

The presentation delivered by staff included subjective information on some of the libraries’ importance to their communities. It also included proposals to maximize revenue opportunities at the library.

Getting Creative

Staff’s plan presented to council members included proposals raising fees for room rentals, charging for central library parking or notary services, and creating passport offices in libraries to generate revenue.

Shorr estimated the service could bring in approximately $100,000 annually, but also conceded that none of the options would necessarily raise $2.6 million.

“The one that I think will bring in the most amount of money for the general fund would be potential passport offices, especially if we can run two, three or four of them around the city,” Shorr said. “I know libraries that bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year with passport running passport offices.”

Council member Adam Bazaldua expressed interest in revenue-collecting opportunities beyond those presented by Shorr and asked the director to go a step further.

“I think that it’s really inside the box. I was thinking much more of outside the box,” Bazaldua said. “These are very nominal. I think that even if we maximize every single revenue potential that you’ve listed here, we’re not hitting that $2.6 million. And so I’m thinking more about naming-rights opportunities, sponsorship opportunities, even lease opportunities for coffee shops.”

Bazaldua also questioned why money from the sale of the Skillman Southwestern Branch Library, which closed in 2025 and netted the city $3.3 million at auction, could not be used to close gaps in the system’s budget. 

City of Dallas Chief Financial Officer Jack Ireland explained that profits from the sale of city-owned properties are placed in a fund dedicated to citywide deferred maintenance needs, but that funds from the Skillman Southwestern sale could be redirected to fund the library system with a council vote.

“So here we are with $2.6 million that was already from the library system,” Bazaldua said. “I don’t believe that we have to reinvent the wheel, and I don’t know how much of the needle it’s moving for us to put that $2.6 million into our large needs of deferred maintenance.”

Council members also expressed interest in pursuing retail-centered locations similar to the Bookmarks library at NorthPark Center in the future as an alternative to relatively more expensive standalone libraries. Shorr told the committee that more people attend programs at the Bookmarks location than all 28 branch libraries combined.

“All I need is time to make this happen,” Shorr said. “I need to develop relationships with developers. That’s not an easy thing to do. In Fort Worth, I used the Bookmarks model to open two retail libraries. One of them took three years of working with a developer. So the one thing that I haven’t had is the time I need to do all of these creative and innovative things that the committee and the council want.”

Even as staff appear to be moving forward to protect the remaining neighborhood branches, some have warned that the fight is far from over. Council member Paul Ridley, whose district covers the Oak Lawn area, told the Observer last week that he wasn’t comfortable with calling its future secure yet, as plans still have to be approved by the full council.

“It is still endangered,” Ridley said in an interview. “We need to fight for it.”