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Welcome to the Save the Detroit Public Library Coalition

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The Detroit Public Library is currently facing extraordinary threats to its future, ranging from a political takeover of its governing structure, to unjust looting of its finances.  The Detroit Public Library has been losing  $3-4 Million  of their operational budget every year since 2016 because it is being siphoned off by the Downtown Development Authority (DDA), which is appointed and chaired by Mayor Duggan, using “tax captures.” That money is being redistributed to rich private developers like the Ilitch family and Dan Gilbert, with no restrictions on its use. Detroit is the only city in the State of Michigan where this is done to the libraries by force; every other library in Michigan is exempt from tax capture under state law. Furthermore, other DDAs in Michigan typically capture less than 5% from the budget of any millage-funded institution, but Detroit’s DDA has been capturing above 12% of the DPL’s budget in recent years, and they are projected to c...
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Lies they tell about the Library

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Here is a list of misinformation that has been coming out of city officials regarding the nature of the Detroit Public Library and its current status. The reason I'm choosing to call these lies and not misconceptions or errors is because normally when a public official says something inaccurate as a result of being misinformed, they retract their statement once they have the correct information. The difference here is that there has been no detectable effort on the part of these officials to our knowledge to correct their false statements. Don't fall for this stuff! LIE #1: "The DPL is financially unsustainable, or failing." This one comes from Councilman Scott Benson. On April 26th and May 12th of 2022, Benson made arguments before the rest of City Council that governance of the DPL should be taken over by the city because it is "no longer sustainable," and stands "at a precipice" where it could "go dark in the next ten years." This is c...
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What is the current status of the fight for the DPL?

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Here is a brief timeline of events related to the fight for the Detroit Public Library, in reverse chronological order, so that the latest news is at the top. September 5, 2023 As a member organization of the  Detroiters For Tax Justice , we unveiled shocking new data on the effects of tax captures before City Council and members of the press. Using Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, we retrieved reports from the DEGC on how much money they have taken from each millage on our tax bill, for the years 2014-2022. We then compiled all of that data into a spreadsheet, and we also combined it with tallies of what that stolen money could have paid for had it not been tax captured.  For instance, the DEGC tax captured $23.5M from the Detroit Public Library millage since 2014; that money could have paid to restore and reopen both the Monteith and  Conely Branches, brought the Bowen Branch up to ADA compliance, ran the "Laptop-To-Go" program for nine years, paid the sala...
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What is the Downtown Development Authority, and who is on it?

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  In case you don't get the references in this illustration, local oligarch Dan Gilbert is siphoning operational budget money from the Detroit Public Library for his Hudson's site project, with the help of the Downtown Development Authority (DDA). In the summer of 2022, Gilbert also requested (and received) an additional $60 Million in tax breaks for his project on top of subsidies he was already getting. That's the Skillman Branch Library in the photo, which has been closed "while major construction continues in the area that's disrupting access and parking," according to DPL Executive Director Jo Ann Mondowney. So in other words the library is closed to us because of Dan Gilbert's private construction project. Anyway, what is the DDA? According to the  description on their own webpage  it is a branch of the Detroit Economic Growth Corporation (DEGC), and they "support private investments and business growth through loans, sponsorships and grants, ca...
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