Library Cuts Fought in IA, NY

Library supporters in Iowa are organizing a grass-roots effort to protest a proposal by Gov. Chet Culver to cut state funding for libraries by 18 percent or $1,119,442. Public libraries stand to lose 75 percent of their state aid. The state library would lose $135,000. Library service areas, operating as regional library systems, would be cut $259,442, Iowa State Library head of development Sandy Dixon told LJ. Those systems provide consulting services, training, and CE opportunities for rural libraries. Enrich Iowa, which supports interlibrary loan, would lose $725,000.

Meanwhile, the New York Library Association (NYLA) hopes to convince state legislators to restore the $5 million cut in supplemental library system aid proposed by Gov. Eliot Spitzer. Library aid had been frozen between 1998 and 2003 and was cut by $4.5 million in 2004. The cut was restored in 2005 and aid increased by $3 million in 2006. In 2007, the legislature increased operating aid again by $5 million, NYLA executive director Michael Borges told LJ.

Delaware governor Ruth Ann Minner, one-third of the “Dream Team” that won LJ’s Politician of the Year Award (see LJ 9/15/07, p. 30–31), looks to close her final budget with a nice nod to libraries, offering an increase in construction funds despite a generally tough fiscal climate. Minner’s recommended FY09 operating and capital budgets hold spending growth to less than four percent. In FY08, only one library received construction funding, for a total of $1 million. This year, Minner recommended $8.5 million, encompassing four projects, as well as a $200,000 increase in funding for personal computer replacement and library technologies.