The City of San Diego Library Director has just announced that the Ocean Beach branch will reopen for six day service by the end of this June.
The OB branch, along with branches in Mountain View and Clairemont have been closed while most of the 36 branches have reopened. Two – North Clairemont and Serra Mesa-Kearny Mesa — have been partially closed.
Library Director Misty Jones said the city has finally hired enough new library workers to fully reopen all city branches by June 30, the end of the fiscal year.
Jones did not provide specific dates for the Ocean Beach Library reopening, nor of the branches in Mountain View and Clairemont
Jones also announced that she will follow through on a plan to add Sunday hours at 13 branches. They include the Point Loma branch – “eventually.”
David Garrick at the San Diego U-T reported:
The city’s recent hiring efforts have gone well enough to soon start providing five-hour Sunday service at four branches that were chosen because they are in low-income areas where libraries typically are more essential to residents, Jones said. Those branches are downtown, Valencia Park, Logan Heights and City Heights.
Jones plans to eventually add Sunday hours at nine other branches. They are Mira Mesa, Otay Mesa, Pacific Beach, Mission Valley, Carmel Valley, La Jolla, Serra Mesa, Point Loma and Rancho Bernardo.
Because of a severe staffing crisis due to the pandemic, the city has not had sufficient library workers to open all the branches – or at least that’s what OBceans have been told whenever they ask why the OB library hasn’t opened yet. It’s been suggested that another factor has been “the city’s time-consuming solution … to replace part-time workers with full-timers.”
San Diego libraries closed completely in 2020 from March 13 through May 26. It was last summer that Jones announced all 36 branches would fully reopen, Monday through Saturday, by that September. Yet, the library had to fill more than 275 vacant positions. The result: 3 branches remain fully closed and two are partially closed.
Garrick:
During the re-opening process, Jones and Mayor Todd Gloria decided the pandemic was an opportunity to make a significant long-term change in library staffing.
They decided to replace the library’s hourly, part-time positions with jobs that have benefits. The goal was reducing job turnover rates, which had been roughly 30 percent among hourly employees.
Hiring to fill those positions is taking about four to six months, partly because of the need for city officials to negotiate with the Municipal Employees Association labor union because the workers will now be full time and union-eligible.
Jones said the city has also struggled with the same shortage of available workers that private businesses have faced during the pandemic.
She said the city expects to fill 134 of 174 remaining vacancies with candidates who have already been interviewed and vetted but not officially hired. The remaining 40 slots will be filled by an additional wave of recruiting efforts, she said.
Go to Garrick’s reporting for more city-wide details.
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While I’m excited to finally have a ballpark reopening date, I still don’t understand how our branch was selected to stay closed. Every time I have visited, the OB library was full of life – kids on the rug, computer stations full, tables with folks reading.
The councilmember in our District has done nothing about the library. How stupid can a person be, what would have garnered her more good press than jumping on this problem? OB didn’t vote for her so this is her attitude, ignoring the people in OB who actually did vote for her.