#27: Open your doors (or have a machine do it) →

My current library has automatic front doors—not the sliding kind that detect motion and open automatically, but the kind that have buttons that a user can press to open them. The doors have some kind of loose electrical connection and sometimes don’t open when the buttons are pressed. Every single time this happens, we submit a service request to the City’s Building Services Division. It’s driving their techs a little bit crazy because their department is understaffed and they have to take care of a lot of City buildings, but we do it anyway because it’s a high-priority issue for us. Water leaks and scraped up walls aren’t great, but they don’t prevent people getting into the library like broken automatic doors do. Every time the techs come out, either the doors work just fine, or the techs press the button over and over, harder and harder, until they work once, and then declare them ‘okay’ even though that is not how a member of the public (especially an elderly person or someone who otherwise doesn’t have very much strength) would use them. It makes me grind my teeth, but we’re doing what we can on our end to keep putting pressure on the people who can fix them until they get fixed.

At my previous branch, we did not have automatic doors at all. The library’s Facilities department asked each branch to submit a wish list for the new fiscal year, so of course the year I was there I badgered my boss to put automatic doors at the top of our list, but so far that branch has not gotten them.

I wondered how much it would likely cost the City to get them installed. I’d heard it was an expensive upgrade and I figured that’s probably why we didn’t do it. I did some research, and it was surprisingly hard to find estimates, I guess because there is big variation. However, it looks like it would cost somewhere in the range of $2,000-$3,000 for a simple kit that adds on to an existing swing door, or in the $5,000-$10,000 range for the full cost of converting a manual commercial front door into an automatic one including parts, installation, etc.

The most helpful thing I found was a 2017 estimate by the city of Alexandria, Virginia that it would cost a total of $10,200 to convert two sets of heavy doors on one side of their City Hall to automatic. The Dallas Public Library’s FY18-19 budget for operations (excludes money for materials, but includes money for staff salaries, utilities, building maintenance, etc.) was $26,442,249. I know from other reading that staff salaries are usually the majority of a library’s operating budget—let’s imagine here that they represent 70% of the budget, which would leave $7,932,675 for facilities costs. DPL is a large system and has a 10-story Central library and 27 other locations to maintain. If we treat the Central library as equivalent to 10 branches (1 floor about the size of one branch library), one branch’s fraction of that facilities budget is 1/37 of that money, or $214,396.61 per branch. If we assume it would cost Dallas about the same amount to install doors as it would have cost Alexandria, it would be about 4.76% of the Library’s facilities budget for my old branch for the yea to add automatic doors. 1/20th of the year’s facilities budget is pretty significant, given the energy costs and routine maintenance that I’m sure is necessary., but it seems doable, if not in a single year, than maybe over a few fiscal years. Obviously this is a real back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it gives you a general idea of the level of investment that upgrading to automatic doors would be. 5% of your facilities budget for the year seems like a good price to pay for making it easier for people with wheelchairs, walkers, and strollers to come in.