As the San Diego Union-Tribune reported today, “The long-awaited return of Sunday public library hours in San Diego could come this spring as library officials say they’ve made significant progress filling a rash of 275 employee vacancies spurred by the pandemic.”
Some branches will reopen on Sunday over the next two months. But not the Ocean Beach Library.
As the U-T stated: “San Diego was also relatively slow to reopen its branches on days other than Sundays, with four branches remaining fully or partially closed until last year and with Ocean Beach still not fully re-opened.”
The Ocean Beach Library reopened for normal Monday-through-Thursday hours last May. Friday and Saturday hours are expected to be restored on Feb. 3, (Head librarian Misty) Jones said this week.
Full hours were restored at:
- the Serra Mesa branch last March,
- the North Clairemont library last April and
- the Clairemont and Mountain View branches last July.
Regular hours for a branch are:11:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Mondays and Tuesdays and 9:30 a.m. to 6 p.m.?on Wednesdays through Saturdays.
Jones expects to have five-hour Sunday service at 13 of the city’s 36 branches — the same amount of Sunday service San Diego had before its libraries shut down in spring of 2020.
If there aren’t enough workers for Sunday service to resume at all 13 branches immediately, Jones plans first to add Sunday service at four branches in low-income areas where library hours are considered most critical:
- downtown,
- Valencia Park,
- Logan Heights and
- City Heights.
The remaining nine branches slated for Sunday service are:
- Mira Mesa,
- Otay Mesa,
- Pacific Beach,
- Mission Valley,
- Carmel Valley,
- La Jolla,
- Serra Mesa,
- Point Loma and
- Rancho Bernardo.
Apparently, a good part of the problem stems from “…earlier in the pandemic, Jones and Mayor Todd Gloria decided to use library closures as an opportunity to make a significant long-term change in library staffing, replacing the library’s hourly, part-time positions with jobs that have benefits. The goal was reducing turnover, which had been roughly 30 percent among hourly employees.”
But the process hasn’t gone smoothly. There are still 176 vacancies. Patrick Stewart, chief executive of the San Diego Library Foundation, said “the city is also to blame for an unusually slow hiring process for all city jobs, which take an average of more than 200 days to fill. “It’s an egregious amount of time…”
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Can anybody make any sense out of all of this?
Clairemont has the largest population of all the council districts.
However, there have not been and will not be any Sunday hours for the Clairemont libraries.
I thought that the mayor was all about “equity” which means that CD2 should have one library open for Sunday access in my opinion.
Crazy!
What’s even crazier is how the librarians get harassed by some of the people that go in the OB library. Thursday the security guy had to walk out a very belligerent guy and some guy was laying out front near the bench with a blanket on his lap pleasuring himself. Very disturbing!!!!!
Good news! The OB Library will finally be opening fully (M-Sa) starting Saturday Feb 4th! Not only that, but OB is one of the libraries with a full-time youth services librarian…which is great considering OB Elementary across the street. We hope to have our first outside book sale later this spring (OB Friends of the Library).
The OB hours are so useless. For working families, Monday and Tuesday evenings are the only options. It’s a shame OB has been at the bottom of their list for the past few years, and they can’t at least move the staff around every few months to have some balance.
At least we have Point Loma library a short drive away, who are open Friday and Saturday and is also not a homeless encampment.