Here in Hudson, we just successfully passed a voter referendum to increase the City of Hudson’s support for our library for the first time in a decade. By a better than 60% margin voters here affirmed the importance of the library in our daily life.

Now we are faced with cuts at the state level that will make it more difficult to sustain the library here and across the state.

From the New York Library Association:

This will be the fifth cut in less than two years and will bring Library Aid down from $102 million in 2007 to $84.5 million in 2010. These cuts combined total an $18 million or 18% reduction in funding for library services. Libraries are part of our safety net—they are essential to life long learning, jobs and opportunity, quality of life and community empowerment.

Sign the Online Petition to Support Public Libraries

There is an online petition you can sign to support funding for public libraries in the upcoming state budget:

June 15, 2009

OUR TOWNS

Two Rebirths, Miraculous but Unfinished

All week long, the grand flotilla, led by a replica of Henry Hudson’s Half Moon, has made its way up the river. It sailed under the Rip Van Winkle Bridge here Thursday afternoon, marking the anniversary of the ship’s voyage 400 years ago.

Part history lesson, part spectacle, part celebration, Hudson 400 in many ways marks a fragile, incomplete miracle — the way the river, a foul industrial cesspool just three decades ago, has been brought back to life.

But if the river, in large part, has been reclaimed, the future of the towns along it is a more complicated business. And few places reflect those complications more than Hudson, about 100 miles north of New York City. Once a raucous industrial city spewing pollutants into the river, then a boarded-up postindustrial corpse, now, like the river, it’s both a marvel of reclamation and a problematic unfinished story.

Here is a link to the whole article in PDF download format.

The observations strike us as on target concerning the situation with jobs and the local population. There definitely are several realities at play in Hudson. Small stages make the contrasts more easily visible.