Op-ed: The Princeton Public Library Is worth every penny

On a recent Thursday morning at the Princeton Public Library, adults practiced English conversation with a teacher while toddlers enjoyed story time. Princeton University student volunteers helped kids with homework, while teens taught first graders how to code. That evening, former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky discussed poetry, democracy, and culture.

One building. One day. All of it free.

The library is fondly known to many as Princeton’s living room. It is a place for readers and job seekers, for residents who need help filing their taxes, for people who don’t have internet at home and need to look something up, and for anyone who needs a safe, warm place to sit and read a newspaper. In the summer, it is a cooling center. It is one of the few institutions in this town that serves everyone with no questions asked.

Monday night, the Princeton Town Council will vote on the 2026 municipal budget. The proposed flat funding for the library creates a $149,000 gap. The library already reduced its hours this winter and will face further cuts without the additional funding.

“Princeton For All” is on lawn signs all over town. Is this true, or is it just virtue signaling? Because you cannot claim to be a community for all and simultaneously squeeze one of the key institutions that actually serves everyone.

Like the municipality itself, the library saw its costs rise sharply this year, with health insurance premiums rising 36%. The library has already responded by eliminating certain streaming services, limiting employee health plan options, and cutting hours.

In this year’s budget fight, the library is being treated less like essential civic infrastructure and more like a discretionary nonprofit. That is a fundamental misreading of what a public library is.

The Princeton Public Library is not a nonprofit competing for charitable dollars. A library is closer to a school, a park, or a fire department than it is to a private charity. When a town underfunds its public library, it is not trimming a nice-to-have. It is eroding a civic institution.

That distinction matters practically, too. Libraries multiply the value of every other organization in town. They provide meeting space, research help, and programming partnerships. They support early literacy, digital access, job readiness, after-school engagement, and social connection. When libraries shrink, those needs do not disappear. They just become someone else’s problem, usually at greater cost.

Instead of simply funding the gap, the town floated a different idea: the library can have its $149,000 if it agrees to end the free two-hour parking validation for cardholders at the Spring Street Garage. Think about what that actually means. It shifts a cost directly onto the people who need the library most — the family on a tight budget who drove across town, the senior on a fixed income, the person who cannot walk several blocks carrying books and a child. And here is the kicker: the library does not own or operate that garage. The town does. Framing parking as a concession that the library must make puts the board in the position of taking the blame for a decision the town controls.

Council has also suggested the library dip into its endowment to cover the gap. But those funds were given by donors for a specific purpose, to supplement public funding, not replace it. Using endowment money to cover rising health insurance costs is a misuse of donor intent, and the library’s Friends and Foundation has said so plainly.

Council has also claimed that Princeton carries the highest per-capita library funding in New Jersey, and possibly the nation, citing that as a reason to ask hard questions. But that claim does not hold up. Princeton is among the higher-funded municipal libraries in the state — a fact that reflects the scale and intensity of use, not waste. The better question is not whether Princeton spends a lot. It is what residents get for it. And the answer is one of the most heavily used public buildings in town, open to everyone, every single day.

That $4.98 million — about $600 per average household — pays for free internet and computers for people who cannot afford them at home, early literacy programs, ESL classes, job search resources, and a safe space for people who have nowhere else to go. It pays for librarians who have quietly become first responders to mental health crises, housing instability, and food insecurity, because the library is where people show up when they do not know where else to turn.

You cannot put a line-item value on a child who learned to read there. Or a job that got landed because of the résumé help. Or the connection a senior found instead of isolation.

Princeton is not having this fight in a vacuum. Across the country, public libraries are under attack — budgets cut, hours reduced, collections challenged, institutions that have served communities for generations suddenly treated as expendable. The same assault is playing out against public media, universities, and cultural institutions of all kinds. What disappears when these places erode is something that cannot easily be replaced: free, public spaces where democracy does its quietest and most important work. Princeton’s budget pressures are real. But the decision it makes on Monday will say something larger about whether this community intends to protect what is public, or slowly let it go.

Princeton is growing. Walk into the library on most afternoons or evenings, and you will struggle to find a seat. This is not an institution in decline. It is a building full of people who need it. The question before the Council is not whether to rescue something that is failing. It is whether to fund something that is working extremely well.

The library serves everyone, but it matters most to the people who have the fewest alternatives.

The council vote is Monday, April 27, at 7 p.m. at Witherspoon Hall. There will be a public hearing on the budget. If this matters to you, the time to say so is now.

Princeton calls itself a community for everyone. The library is one of the only places where that is true. Fund it.