Centre Daily Times Editorial

Today's Centre Daily Times has an editorial titled "Higher priority given to trinkets" that speaks in behalf of saving the State Library.

The editorial begins

Imagine a Pennsylvania with no state library. Benjamin Franklin could not and, as clerk of the Assembly, was instrumental in creating it in 1754.

Ed Rendell apparently can, however, and his proposed budget, if passed by the current General Assembly, will be responsible for closing it in 2009.

Libraries, local museums — our history and our culture — these are the “nonessentials” targeted for elimination as lawmakers try to deal with a $2.3 billion revenue shortfall and a deepening recession.

While Rendell’s spokesman touts the governor’s “well-known” record of support for libraries and education, his priorities — revealed by how he proposes to allocate the state’s resources — speak otherwise.

Among the sacrifices, the apparently acceptable casualties about which Rendell wants to hear “no whining,” are life-enriching resources and programs that enable us to read — and find meaning in — more than just the Dow Jones industrial average.

That's pretty much what we feel, too.

The "trinkets" in the title, by the way, refer to the fancy desk sets handed out to legislators when they were sworn in earlier this year. Did you hear about that? Our legislature paid "$17,700 for holy books and souvenirs — a Harrisburg 'tradition,' repeated again and again and again" in January because "each member of the General Assembly, just for showing up and getting sworn into office, received a Bible, Torah or Quran and a nifty desktop pen set fashioned from a 3- inch chunk of coal." I mean, really? Some of our elected officials have to have a closet full of these from all the previous times they've been sworn in.

It would have been a little thing, sure, but they could have skipped that expense this year.

The editorial also mentions the Dan Surra hiring fiasco. And it wraps up with a plea that should be echoed across the state:

Lawmakers could start by paying for the commemorative items to which they feel entitled, a drop in the bucket, perhaps, but trends must start somewhere. Then they could tap into the state’s rainy day fund — money set aside for desperate times exactly as these. And they most certainly should eliminate the legislative slush fund they maintain to hold as leverage in the annual budget battle with the governor.

And if taxes have to be levied on smokeless tobacco and cigars, and on those who stand to profit greatly — and damage the state’s precious wild lands in the process — by extracting natural gas from the rock layer a mile below ground, so be it.

Then, when politicians boast about their support for indispensibles that enrich lives other than their own — as being among their priorities, we might believe them.

At the Library we're just trying to enrich people's lives, not our own bank accounts.