When they came for my library

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Last week my town held the third vote on my municipal library’s budget. It passed, but it was touch and go there for a while. I got a big raise which I am grateful for but also won’t affect my life that much since I am a super part-timer and have been during my whole twenty years working here. The library director got a 40% raise which seems shockingly large but only because she was terribly underpaid before then. She has a Masters degree and nearly 25 years of experience running this particular library which includes managing a historical building as well as a staff of three and a few part-timers like myself. The story isn’t the usual “people don’t want to fund their library” but in some ways it is. Here are the larger points in the debate which has been going on since last November.

My town had a town manager who was leaving after five years. He and the library director did not get along well. When the trustees proposed their budget for this year, doing a large amount of research into equitable salaries and increased costs of everything from fuel oil to health insurance, it went to the town manager, who altered it (lowered it). This alteration was made both because he felt that the proposed salaries were too high and also because of a misunderstanding in how many FTEs the library actually had. This budget, not the trustees’ budget, was what made it to Town Meeting where, after much discussion it was voted down. Part of the discussion included a straw poll asking if people were voting the budget down because it was too high or too low, the consensus (among the small group of town meeting attendees) was that it was too low. This straw poll did not make it into the town meeting minutes. It’s actually a whole thing that the library budget needs to be voted on separately instead of just being part of the town budget. I know it hasn’t always been like this.

So with the budget voted down, it was up to the Selectboard to come up with a new budget. The Selectboard did not think the staff at the library should get large raises. Even though these raises would make their pay more equitable among library staff locally and nationwide, the Selectboard said it put them out of alignment with other town employees. Of course, the town has had a lot of turn over in the past few years–we’ve hired a new zoning manager, a new town manager and a new finance director–and hiring new people has always meant a large salary jump, so it’s awkward that one of the people who has not left appeared to be getting in some way penalized for this. And then the local rhetoric started, how we don’t need a library, not like we need the police or the road crew. And people started making charts and graphs and going to Selectboard meetings and being generally surly, on both sides of the issue. My library is okay on doing public communications but, I’ll be honest, not great at it. They did put this page on their website which I thought was good.

There was a second vote, with ballots mailed to all eligible voters, with another Selectboard-determined budget which gave library staff raises in line with other town employees. This was still a significantly lower budget than the one the trustees proposed and so library staff were in the awkward position of telling people to vote no on the budget, but not officially, because trustees and staff could not agree on tactics. Over 900 people voted and it failed by 18 votes. The debate then turned to whether the budget was voted down because people thought it was too high or because people thought it was too low. The Selectboard was bothered by this, and still had to pass a budget. Mailing ballots and running this one-item election cost thousands of dollars.

After much contentious discussion, the Selectboard decided on a weird hybrid vote. They’d put their initial budget up for a vote (plus a dollar because they couldn’t just put up the same amount) as Article 1 and then as Article 2 they’d put up the difference between the trustees’ budget and their own, a difference of under $40,000. The entire municipal budget is about five million dollars. So the idea was, if you want a lower budget, vote them both down. If you want the trustees’ budget, you vote them both up. If you want the Selectboard budget, you vote yes on Article 1 and no on Article 2. It was confusing. Ballots got mailed to everyone but not the fancy scantron ones like last time. It still cost thousands of dollars. All over a budget difference of about 40K.

But ultimately, it wasn’t about the 40K, it was about who gets to set the salaries of the librarians and about who gets to decide how much money the library gets. The library was also in a secondary disagreement with the town about a historical preservation grant, whether to accept 150K which came with the encumbrance of a perpetual easement. The town had argued over this for literally years and it was part of the bad vibes between the library and the town.

I’m an election worker but I wasn’t able to work either of these elections because of conflict of interest so when the election happened, I was at home waiting for someone to text me the result. Over 1200 people voted. Both Articles passed! But only by 45 votes on Article 2. In fact it was so close that it had been initially miscounted and I was told that Article 2 had failed. The annual budget (which should have passed in March) being finalized meant that the town could finally set the tax rate and send people their tax bills for the coming year which was cutting it close since the first installment is due at the end of October.

I’m relieved but also sad. People came out of the woodwork to rally against the library. People were crappy about it on social media. The Selectboard who was presumably creating their own budget because of fairness also felt anti-library as they continued to put budgets up for a vote which were not the budgets set by the trustees. I know many libraries are dealing with worse issues–terrible book challenges and irrational anti-library sentiment–but it was definitely a taste for me about the library being a battlefield and I’m hoping things stabilize over the next year.