Chicago’s public libraries will roll out new Sunday hours gradually in 2020, with the goal of adding them to all the branch libraries by the end of the year, the library commissioner said Wednesday.
Commissioner Andrea Telli also told aldermen during her 2020 budget hearing on Wednesday that there’s been a big jump in the number of books returned in the few weeks since Chicago ended library overdue fines.
Two weeks after Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced she would raise property taxes by $18 million to fund adding Sunday hours at all 81 library locations, Telli said staffing issues will determine which open when. She also said she wants to be fair about which branches open first from 1 to 5 p.m. on Sundays.
“We don’t want them all to open first on the North Side or the South Side,” Telli said. “We want them spread around the city as they open.”
Perhaps 15 to 20 branches will open Sundays in the first quarter of 2020, Telli said during the hearing. More branches will then be added throughout the year.
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As for the new no-fines policy Lightfoot unveiled a month ago, Telli said there has been a 240% increase since then in the number of books returned to the library.
She acknowledged it’s still too early to draw long-term conclusions about whether more people are using the libraries because their outstanding fines got erased.
“I think we are seeing additional patrons come in to the branches,” she said. “We only have three weeks of data, so I think what I’d like to do is be able to look at that full month of data during the month of October and maybe even the month of November to see if the numbers have absolutely increased.
“Just by word of mouth, and then also on the library’s social media pages like Facebook, we saw a lot of patrons say, ‘Oh my god, this is so great, I’m going to bring back my books,'” Telli added.
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