Pie Palace

The OPL had 555 volunteers in 2007. They were equivalent to roughly 13 full time positions. (see http://www.piepalace.ca/blog/2010/07/my-fixation.html for sources)

Mr. Hagenaars original proposal was to lay off all but 33 OPL employees. Considering that it takes about 43 volunteers to equal one full time position at the OPL, and there are 419 positions to fill, that would require an extra 18,017 volunteers. That would be something like one out of every 48 Ottawa residents.

Let’s aim a little lower. If the library manages to double the number of volunteers, and (as Mr. Hagenaars has stated) the average library employee costs $54,000 (rounded up to $75k to include benefits, etc), the annual savings would be $975,000. Not bad, but only 2.4% of the OPL’s annual budget. If we consider that the easiest folks to replace would probably be library pages (who make a maximum of ~$35,000 – let’s call it $50,000 to cover other costs) then the savings would be $650,000. That’s 1.6% of the library’s annual budget.

Note that these numbers are very pie-in-the-sky: they don’t include the cost of recruiting, training, managing, and retaining those volunteers. I assume the volunteer-related costs would probably be equivalent to another few employees.

At best, we’re looking at a savings of 2.4% of the OPL’s annual budget. In the absolute best case scenario we can say “look! that’s the amount taxes raise every year!” (under Jim Watson), but I’m not convinced we’d be able to get those numbers in real life. Given that the margin of success is so thin, I suspect we’d end up with a net-zero program: instead of paying for 13 pages, we’d be paying to manage an extra 555 volunteers.