In virtually every city and town in Massachusetts, public libraries are struggling to maintain their certification in the wake of debilitating budget cuts. Harvard’s library seems relatively safe in that regard for the moment, but unless certification requirements change or the budget picture improves faster than expected, town officials see serious problems ahead.
The most worrisome state requirement for Harvard is the municipal appropriation requirement (MAR), the minimum level of funding each town must provide its library in order to maintain certification. Town officials, including the Library Trustees, are performing a delicate balancing act, trying to make sure that the fiscal 2010 library budget is high enough to meet the MAR without creating greater budget problems in future years. And the problem is compounded by uncertainty about how to calculate the MAR this year. By law, the MAR is calculated by taking an average of the amounts appropriated for library support in the three preceding fiscal years and adding 2.5 percent. But the fiscal 2009 library budget was reduced by $40,000 mid-year as part of townwide spending cuts. If this year’s MAR calculation uses the original fiscal 2009 budget figure, the fiscal 2010 library appropriation would have to be at least $498,428, but there has been some indication that the state Board of Library Commissioners (BLC) will allow towns to use their reduced fiscal 2009 budget figures in calculating the MAR instead. That would reduce the mandated figure to $484,762, according to a recent Finance Committee report.
The actual library appropriation in the proposed 2010 budget that will be voted on at Annual Town Meeting is $495,187, and Finance Director Lorraine Leonard is confident that the BLC will accept it. If not, she said, the town will argue that municipal spending for the library also includes employee benefits costs that show up in another line item but should be counted as part of the library budget. And if all else fails, the town can apply for an MAR waiver. The BLC granted 22 waivers this fiscal year out of 26 requests and is under intense pressure to relax its certification requirements or even abandon them during the current fiscal crisis, Leonard said, when a growing number of libraries simply can’t meet the funding standards.
But state library board Director Robert C. Maier is quoted in a March 16 Boston Globe story as saying that the standards must be maintained to avoid gutting libraries, which he described as “an essential service that people need, just as much as they need services from the department of public works, from the police department, from the schools.” And indeed, a number of press reports nationwide confirm Harvard library Director Mary Wilson’s experience that library use is growing as the economy declines, in part because people are borrowing books and videos instead of buying or renting them.
In the long run, however, Harvard officials and their counterparts across the state see the MAR as untenable. For the next couple of years, at least, they expect that town spending will have to stay flat, and they consider it unreasonable for the state to require a 2.5 percent increase in library funding. “It’s ridiculous that they make you increase it by more than the town budget increase,” fumed Finance Committee member Bob Thurston last week.
