by Amos Bloomberg
When I walk into the Croton Free Library, I immediately feel my blood pressure drop and the worries of the day evaporate. Tutors whisper softly across the tables to their pupils, children scratch crayons on paper, patrons of all ages bury themselves into knowledge while librarians research and assist with infinite patience. The stolid desk staff stand like sentinels, wordlessly guarding the peace. You would be crazy to question the value of such a public good. So I was as surprised as you might be to find out that the Croton Free Library is neither public nor good. It’s not in Croton, and it’s certainly not free.
The Croton Free Library is not public. It is an association library, the oldest of the four types of libraries allowed in New York State. Association libraries are private not-for-profit corporations that enter into contract with a municipality or school district -- in our case the Croton-Harmon Union Free School District. But the library is run independently of the schools, without the rights and responsibilities of a public institution. The library is owned by its Trustees.
The Croton Free Library is run by an oligarchy. The Board of Trustees is not elected. It does not answer to the people. New Trustees are appointed by existing Trustees, like a secret cabal, without a public vote. Want a position on the Board? You have to know the right people. I know some of them - they’re very nice people! But in a small town, you can imagine that this grows organically into a kind of monoculture.
Case in point: Since at least 2017, the Board has voted unanimously on every single decision, except one: the infamous November 4, 2024 vote that will go down in the history books as the only sign of any disagreement on any topic by any Board member. The historically-contentious question at hand was whether to discontinue New York Times online access. On everything else, they have been in full agreement for as long as there are records.
Croton Free Library employees work in an oppressive environment. They do not have the right to free speech nor any of the other workers’ rights granted to civil servants. They tried in 2022 but eventually failed to unionize for better working conditions. As employees of a private corporation, answerable only to a Board of unelected self-perpetuating dogmatically-aligned Trustees, staff are at risk of arbitrary discipline or firing for what they say, even in private social media posts. Woe be unto any employee who strays from the script.
As free speech organizations like Freedom for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) have long argued, those holding minority viewpoints are most vulnerable to pressure to conform and most likely to face discipline. Especially in a place of learning, one expects to encounter a “marketplace of ideas”, where ideas are challenged on their merits, not on their current popularity among the dominant in-group. This is only possible in an environment where people are at liberty to express themselves. A library should promote liberty, not oppression.
The Croton Free Library’s operations are hidden from public view. New York State’s Freedom Of Information Law (FOIL) grants citizens the right to inspect and copy records maintained by state and local government agencies, including schools, police, and public libraries. This gives citizens transparency and improves accountability into government operations. You can see what they’re up to in minute detail.
But you can’t do that with the Croton Free Library - it’s private. For example, the library publicly states that it weeds books from its collection based, in part, on the number of check-outs they receive. In meetings, Board members and the Library Director have said that they are aware that some patrons are intentionally “driving up the numbers” of digital check-outs of books of a certain character in order to keep them in the collection, while others are pruned.
Yet, the impact of this activist practice on the bias of the collection is unknown and possibly unknowable without real transparency. The library’s reports repeatedly tout higher numbers of check-outs than all other libraries in the area. They use this to help justify increased spending and to raise your taxes. To what degree are these check-out numbers the result of “check-out activism”? We simply don’t know. A library should make information accessible to the public.
The Croton Free Library is not good. This isn’t my opinion (I love the library), it’s New York State’s. The state’s library guidance rates the four possible library types along an axis of “good, better, best”. Archaic association libraries like ours do not fit onto this axis at all - they are less than good. The state recommends that association libraries transition to one of the other types to improve financial stability, accountability, and transparency.
The Croton Free Library is not in Croton. The library is under contract to serve residents of the Croton-Harmon school district, plus a smaller contract with the Town of Cortlandt to service a large number of residents outside of the school district who have no other library. Yet publicly-available documents show a near-exclusive partnership with the Village of Croton-on-Hudson politicians and committees on programming and events at the virtual exclusion of any other external individuals or groups. Considering that the library contractually serves the school district and the Town, not individual Village politicians and their appointed committee minions, this allegiance to the Village of Croton political class is remarkable and unrepresentative of the majority of taxpayers who fund it. A library should be inclusive.
The Croton Free Library is not free. This year, on May 19th, the library will be asking taxpayers to approve a whopping 55% increase to the library tax levy, from $985,392 last year to $1,526,158 in 2026-2027. As a result of being private, the library cannot issue municipal bonds to raise funds, as would a normal public library. So they raise taxes instead. To their credit, they have attempted to inform the taxpayers about what they intend to do with this massive tax hike - check their website. When they want your money, they give you a bit of transparency... that’s not the way it’s supposed to work.
New York State’s library guidance states that the transition to a “good”, “better”, or “best” type of library will “require considerable effort”. Instead of putting in that effort to clean up its act, protect its employees from the whims of their superiors, fix its regressive structure, increase its transparency, stabilize its finances, and become accountable and inclusive of the taxpayers who fund it, the library Board instead is putting the burden on you. The only reason they need to increase your taxes is because they are not answerable to the public.
In return for the higher taxation, the library must now finally become community-owned and truly public. Chappaqua Library did it in 1970. Mahopac Public Library did it in 1973. Pound Ridge Library did it in 2004. Ossining and Peekskill have done it. Now is the time for the Croton Free Library to belong to the public.
Amos Bloomberg grew up in Croton-on-Hudson in the 1980s and early 1990s, during which time he made full use of the Croton Free Library's wooden cabinet card catalog and the Dewey Decimal System book classification scheme. Amos works as Clinical Professor of Computer Science at New York University, where he focuses on software engineering and education automation. He writes here in his personal capacity.
Department of Correction and Clarification: April 22, 2025
Early in the afternoon of April 21, we received an email from Matt Broudy, publisher of the AI based croton.news site, whom we had earlier invited to write about his new Croton-based project. Broudy had some factual and interpretive disagreements with Amos Bloomberg’s piece above, and wrote that he “was going to publish a correction piece but I thought about it and thought I would give you a chance to correct the record.”
We responded that the most journalistically appropriate and collegial way to approach such a situation was to let the Chronicle send the purported corrections to the author of the piece and allow him to respond. Broudy did not say where he had planned to publish his “correction piece,” although we assumed it would be on his croton.news site.
We did not elaborate on why this was the most journalistically sound approach, but not only is it the habitual way of doing things—allowing the original publication to approach the author of a piece on its own—but also it makes little sense for any corrections to be published elsewhere, since the original readers of a piece would be the ones most in need of being alerted that there had been errors.
We also invited Broudy to place his objections to the piece in the Comments section, but he has not done so. Nevertheless, we did ask Bloomberg to respond to Broudy’s comments which he has now done. We should add that Bloomberg’s obviously provocative piece was the subject of spirited debate on at least one village Facebook page, and that a number of outside comments have been made on it, both pro and con.
Broudy’s comments, and Bloomberg’s responses, fall into four basic categories.
Broudy told us that based on his own research, Peekskill’s Field Library was not a public library, as Bloomberg had stated, but an association library, like Croton’s. Bloomberg agrees that this is correct and that he was in error. The main source for this is a tool for finding the status of libraries in New York. Bloomberg adds that a better example of a public library is the Warner Library serving Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow.
Broudy took issue with Bloomberg’s statements concerning a unionization effort at the Croton Free Library that began in 2022 but later failed to achieve a contract. Bloomberg stands by his statement that the organizing drive failed, and that the need for an organizing drive in the first place reflected dissatisfaction among its workers with their conditions and rate of pay. Bloomberg adds that this point is bolstered by the fact that the library’s stated justifications for its new request for a large tax increase from voters includes the lack of competitiveness of current staff salaries. We would add that the Chronicle’s own reporting on these issues reflects dissatisfaction and low morale among at least some of our library workers.
Broudy maintained that Bloomberg’s contention that library workers do not have free speech is “exaggerated,” adding that “They have the same protections any of us have, just not the additional civil protections.” Bloomberg stands by his original statements, arguing that there is a significant difference in the free speech rights of public and private employees (our library’s employees work for a private association.) Bloomberg cited two articles on this subject, one from the free speech organization FIRE, and the other from PEN America. Bloomberg also cited his own experiences as a professor at NYU, a private university, on these questions.
Bloomberg maintains that he did not, contrary to what Broudy may have implied, suggest that any library was “bad,” but used rhetorical flourishes in the beginning of his piece—eg, referring to the Croton Free Library’s governance as run by an “oligarchy”—to draw in the reader and underscore his points. Bloomberg adds that there have been many misquotes of his statements, and that his basic argument—that public libraries are much more democratic by definition and that association libraries represent taxation without representation—is backed up by New York state library guidance. This guidance refers to library governance systems as “Good, Better, Best.”
When Bloomberg first sent us his draft of a proposed Guest Editorial, we asked him to provide sources and links for many of his statements, which he did. We used most, but not all, of those links, but we were satisfied that the article was on a sound factual basis. The status of the Peekskill library is the only factual error that we have identified editorially, and that we overlooked ourselves. The rest of the issues reflect matters of interpretation of facts, on which honest people can disagree.
Our own view is that many readers of Bloomberg’s piece reacted to it in a defensive way, as if any criticism of how our library is run—or suggestions for improvements— constitute an attack on a beloved institution used by both adults and children in our community. In fact, the Chronicle has been aware for at least the past few years that some in the Croton community have questioned why members of the library’s Board of Trustees are not elected but constitute a self-perpetuating body, even though they spend public tax money allotted to the school district.
Matt Broudy is still free to make comments here, as long as they follow the Comments policy, or to publish his own critique of Bloomberg’s Guest Editorial, in whatever venue he wishes. Meanwhile, this update will serve as our due diligence to correct the record if and when that is required.
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Editor’s Note: The Chronicle strives to give voice to the widest possible diversity of viewpoints in our community. To discuss a submission, please get in touch at TheCrotonChronicle@gmail.com
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I don't know what the fuss on Facebook is about... the intro paragraph is a little dramatic, but the arguments and explanations of the claims here are pretty convincing.
I remember my son and I went to the Library a few years ago to take out the Lord of the Rings as he wanted to start reading the Tolkien trilogy. We were surprised to find no copies of any of the trilogies. We asked for books to be sent from other libraries but we never heard back. I often find myself ordering books on Amazon via Kindle or paperback. For some reason, I think of our library as offering community programming.