I support what most of you are saying, parks could be privatized easily, just like membership pools. Maybe have one organization in charge of the city’s parks, and you purchase a membership or something. A cut in benefits for city employees is probably long overdue, since those things seem to go up when the economy does well, but never go down when the economy does poorly
But I have to really disagree about libraries and parks being non-essential. While it’s true that you don’t need them to survive, I think that having access to a library is one of the most important parts of any society. A literate population with the ability to educate itself is important, and libraries make it so you at least have the option to study anything you really want.
You could say they should rely on fees, but really, when you need libraries most is often when you CAN’T afford fees, and access to knowledge gives people who are impoverished a chance to better themselves and become productive and prosperous.
You could say they should rely on donations, but really, libraries should be a long-term, stable, available organization. People are generous, and I think they WOULD support libraries, but they get distracted by other things, or whatever, but generally, donations DO drop off unless something is an immediate project. For a long-term project, the libraries would have to constantly advertise and plead for money to remind people that libraries do take money.
That’s how you get things like NPR which are ‘commercial free’ but it’s like 90% “send us money send us money” (gee, good plan). If NPR didn’t get donations and vanished tomorrow, that is fine, but libraries shouldn’t be that fragile.
I really think, and I think all the founding fathers would agree, that libraries are fundamental to liberty, at least as important as national defense to our country.
Your post centers around privatizing libraries but I see absolutely no problem with that. If a community values a library then they can seek out funders - or donors as you mention - and create one that contains exactly what their community wants! Local businesses that see value in, say, providing internet service there, that include their advertising and allows them to address their local target users makes perfect sense to me.
Why do you have a problem with simply letting market forces provide the services a community is interested in?
Local citizens organizations are perfectly capable of identifying their own needs and identifying businesses that can supply them and also profit in the supply. In fact community standards are much easier to maintain when the community itself has control of what their members are exposed to - which is a problem with liberal run schools that indoctrinate rather than teach. A publicly run and publicly stocked library simply allows the liberals to provide their material and suppress ours!
This is a great opportunity for Colorado Springs to show the rest of the country how it’s done.