Because of the drastic city-budget cuts, the St. Agnes branch has posted a notice announcing that, beginning on Apr. 1, the metal door will be locked all day on Saturdays.
The most drastic measure city officials took was to impose a 30-day emergency curfew that prohibits children under 18 years old from being on the street after 9 p.m. unless they are with a parent or guardian.
Gains in other cities were less drastic — prices in cities like Urumqi, Wuhan and Nanjing, for example, rose about 10 percent, and those in Haikou, on the southern island of Hainan, edged up 1.1 percent.
On close inspection, these figures did not represent any drastic cut in the city's services.
Even after drastic cuts to city services that have sent the crime rate soaring, the city of 300,000 people about 80 miles east of San Francisco has an annual budget deficit of $26 million.
But it is the impetus for all these drastic changes in city government that has some residents angry.
Mr. Bloomberg made the right bet during last year's budget crisis when he chose higher taxes over drastic reductions in city services.
The surrender, as Mr. Flinn describes it, was a pre-emptive strike, a way to head off a plan by the separate county school system that could have led to a drastic shortfall in city school revenues.
The order was directed at closing what the mayor's staff said was now a $1.6 billion shortage that resulted largely from a drastic drop in city revenue after Sept. 11.
But the package, which is expected to forestall thousands of layoffs, the closing of 40 firehouses and other drastic cuts in city services, does not include a tax on commuters, which the mayor had pushed for months as a way to avoid having city residents bear all of the tax burden.
