Another budget review cycle is soon to begin for Groton, and if we thought the recent past ones were tough, this could be the worst. What can we do?

There are some conversations that you all know you are going to have, somewhere in the budget review. Let’s have one of them now. For many of the years when I worked in the manager’s office, I dreaded the certainty that every year we would inevitably get around to talking about cutting weekend hours, especially Sunday hours, from the Groton Publicn Library.

This year, Sunday hours were saved by a miracle. We cannot plan for identical miracles to become routine from here on. Now I can’t say that no member of the council has been in the library on a Sunday afternoon, but you have to see it. It abounds with students whose homes are small, probably not quiet, and surely have no place for a young person to spread out their papers and get into deep thinking. No place for them to discover important things about themselves and the world they will take part in.

Do they use the youth room, which has wisely been enclosed with glass, to flirt and be social? Well, of course, and that’s just another way a good library – and ours is amazingly good – helps to advance a civilization.

We still don’t have a community recreation center, and we’re not going to. But there is a community center already, and I’m talking about Groton Public Library, along with our superb Senior Center.

So I am proposing a radical way to preserve weekend library service, and sustain it at a high level. Now think about adults, as well, think about all library users. Almost everyone who visits the main library on Monday through Friday between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. can also do that on Saturday and Sundays. There aren’t many library users who work only on weekends and not on weekdays.

But a great number of Groton’s important people can only go to the library at times other than weekday daytimes. When the library is running on all cylinders Monday to Friday, none of our several thousands of students, our precious future generation, are visiting during its daytime hours. That’s 35 hours a week, when the library is open for full service, but cannot serve about 35 percent of the population.

I propose that unless the next Groton budget and all that follow it can sustain full library service on weekends, with well qualified librarians there to help users; the better option to save money is to close for enough weekday hours to pay for maximum weekend service.

Our main library should be open until 5 p.m. Saturdays and probably until at least 8 p.m. on Sunday evenings when students must complete their reports during the school year

Yes, I know there is a union contract and related impediments. But this matter needs a long-term, permanent solution. It needs to be institutionalized, however long it takes.

So I propose that an exchange be made in the designated work shifts that will finance weekend service at the expense of weekday service. If we have to reduce weekday employee hours by eight or more hours in order to pay for five on Sunday or Saturday, that could be a good deal, beneficial to all concerned. If we have to close the library from 9 to 4 Tuesdays and Thursdays, for instance, why not?

Yes, let it be a lopsided trade if it needs to be, so the library crew comes out of this being optimally paid, and all the townspeople get much more of this very valuable service.

Lee D. Vincent was the assistant to the town manager of Groton from 1996-2010. He lives in the Mystic section of Groton.