Come on down to the budget hearing (one hour early)

We’ll be meeting an hour earlier this month so we can squeeze in a budget hearing. This is mostly for the public to let us know what they think about our proposed budget. I wrote about the draft budget we approved last month here.

But, here are the highlights:

Borrowing $238,212 from our reserve fund to balance the budget.
Defunding the Timberland Regional Library Foundation. This has been a major issue the last few meetings, and I apologize for only bringing it up now. The problem for me has been that I am of two minds on the issue. While I see need for a fully functioning foundation, I also realize that the cost to develop one may be beyond our resources.
Lowering the materials budget from 14 percent to 13.7 percent of expenditures. Library director Mike Crose commented at our meeting that he’d like to look at the materials budget on a per-capita basis because he feels that it might be a better way to compare our materials spending to other systems.
Filling a previously unfilled position in information services (IT), adding a half time page position in Tumwater and a children’s associate in Centralia. The addition in Centralia brings their staffing to par with other similar sized libraries.
To balance these additions, we’ll finally cut the community relations position, which had not been filled last year.

So, we’ll be at the TRL Service Center in Tumwater (map link) .