Beltsville was supposed to get a new library in the 1970s, but budget cuts almost shuttered it altogether. The building shown here exists only because of community activism. Image by Prince George’s County Memorial Library System.

This article was first published on December 15, 2020. The history of Prince George’s Library System remains an interesting topic and we wanted to share this piece with you again.

The 1960s and 1970s saw major growth in the Prince George’s County Memorial Library System (PGCMLS), both in the number of branches and in moves to new, larger buildings that allowed more comprehensive library services. But at the end of the 1970s, that growth ground to a halt when residents passed a racially-motivated referendum limiting the county’s taxing authority. That restriction, a form of which exists to this day, brought about an era of austerity for the library system that lasted a generation.

Budget struggles in the wake of TRIM

The construction of new library branches in Prince George’s County significantly slowed after the 1970s, in part due to the county’s severe budget struggles in the aftermath of the 1978 passage of the “Tax Reform Initiative by Marylanders” (TRIM) restriction on the county’s property taxes. TRIM, passed five months after California’s infamous Proposition 13 property tax restriction, initially limited Prince George’s County’s total property tax revenue to its 1979 value of $143.9 million, regardless of inflation and increases in home values.

TRIM passed just as Prince George’s County began a demographic transition from majority-white to majority-Black. A major motivation for its passage was the desire of white voters to limit funding for a public school student body that was becoming increasingly Black and integrated — four years earlier, in 1974, Prince George’s school system had become the largest in the country to be subject to a court-ordered busing desegregation plan.

Holding property tax revenue constant while the county’s population was rapidly growing led to severe cuts to many county services and increases to fees. PGCMLS started charging overdue fines for the first time, and librarians were removed from the system’s smallest branches, which were now only staffed by circulation assistants.

These budget cuts also brought the library system’s rapid expansion to a standstill. After a 1974 referendum authorized the sale of bonds for the construction of a new library branch in Beltsville, PGCMLS had opened a temporary Beltsville branch in a set of interconnected trailers on Old Gunpowder Road. But in January 1979, shortly after the passage of TRIM, the county government suspended the planning of the branch due to anticipated financial shortfalls.

The Beltsville library was saved by community activism, cost-cutting, and the fact that the county police wanted a station in the Beltsville area at the same time. Instead of a new library building, in 1983 work began on renovating the former Chestnut Hills School building in Beltsville to serve as both a county police station and a library branch.

By the early 1980s, the scale of the damage done to the county’s budget and services by TRIM was widely apparent. With the support of then-County Executive and later Governor Parris Glendening, voters supported a referendum in 1984 to change the property tax restriction to a limit on the property tax rate, while allowing assessed values and overall revenue to increase. Financial struggles, however, continued.

The Spauldings Branch, which opened in 1987, replaced the District Heights and Suitland Branches, which had been housed in non-PGCMLS buildings. Image by Prince George’s County Memorial Library System.

In 1987, two new branches did open: the Largo-Kettering branch opened in a rented storefront, and the Spauldings Branch opened in a custom-built building. But the opening of the Spauldings branch came with the closure of two branches located about a mile away from it in different directions: the Suitland and District Heights branches. When the First Regional Branch in Hyattsville opened a similar distance from the College Park and downtown Hyattsville (later Magruder) branches in 1964, the older branches remained open, but the funding situation in the late 1980s made it impossible to keep the Suitland and District Heights branches open alongside Spauldings.

The 1991 budget crisis and its aftermath

Financial issues continued to worsen for PGCMLS in the early 1990s, and in 1991 the library system faced the worst financial crisis in its history. The Largo-Kettering Branch, which had only opened four years earlier, was nearly closed to save money, and was only saved by community activism.

Bookmobile service, which had begun to focus on providing book access to underserved suburban communities as the county’s rural population shrank, had suffered since the 1970s, and no new vehicles had been purchased since 1975. The 1991 budget crisis was the final straw for the beleaguered program, and it was eliminated that year.

The 1991 budget crisis also led to significant staffing cuts and service reductions, which predictably led to falling library usage. To save money, and because of reduced usage, the College Park Branch closed in 1994 and the Magruder Branch closed in 1996.

The Largo-Kettering branch is housed in the lower level of a non-descript office building in an office park in Largo that was purchased by PGCMLS in 1993.  The library system headquarters were relocated from the Hyattsville Branch to the upper level of the building. Image by Prince George’s County Memorial Library System.

Three branches did receive larger spaces during this period, however. An expansion of the Laurel Branch opened in 1993 and, in the same year, the Largo-Kettering Branch moved from a rented storefront to an office building purchased by PGCMLS, the other half of which was used for new administrative offices. Then, in 1995, the Upper Marlboro Branch was moved from a rented storefront to the renovated New Deal-era post office that had recently been vacated by USPS.

The Upper Marlboro Branch is one of the few PGCMLS branches in a pedestrian-oriented commercial strip: in 1995 it was relocated from a rented storefront to the renovated former Upper Marlboro Post Office, built in 1936 as part of the New Deal. Image by Prince George’s County Memorial Library System.

Technological changes in the 1990s

Although the library system closed as many branches as it opened between 1981 and 2012, the 1990s also brought about significant technological changes that improved patrons’ ability to find books. The library system’s catalog was put online in 1992, and in 1994 public databases were made available online. All branches had full internet access by 1998.

In 2000, Marina, a web portal that allows anyone with a Maryland public library card to request books from anywhere in the state, became available to the public, making inter-library loans possible without a librarian to facilitate them.

Another component of statewide library integration came about in 2005 when Maryland became the first state to implementa statewide borrowing program with the “MPOWER” common library card. Although the state’s library systems have returned to issuing their own library cards, it remains the case that a library card from any of Maryland’s 23 counties and Baltimore City can be used in any of the state’s public libraries.

Sources

The history of TRIM is discussed in the University of Pennsylvania PhD dissertation “Power, Privilege, And Peril: Governing In A Suburban Majority Black And Middle Class County - A Regional Perspective,” by Angela Marie Simms, (2019).

A number of newspaper articles also provided useful information for this article:

This is the fourth article in a series about the history of the Prince George’s County library system. Read parts 1, 2, 3, and 5.