Beach Library budget – Fact or fiction
To the editor:
“Library to Shrink Budget by 20 percent!” [actually it’s reduced by 15.7 or 16.5 percent depending on a comparison of the millage rate or dollar amount]. Any decrease for taxpayers is good, but how good is it? The statement that, “You’ll be hard pressed to find other districts that have lowered there taxes” is correct only because you would be hard pressed to find other districts that have inflated their budget for the past 5 years to collect $1 million/year in surplus funds to pay for a new facility.
Almost 60 percent of the Library budget for each of the past 5 years was used to accumulate funds to construct the new facility. The total budget averaged $2 million/year and $1.2 million/year was surplus or debt reduction. Since the $9 million collected to date is sufficient for the building to “be paid for in full,” and the Grand Opening will be during the proposed 2012 budget year, additional funds for construction are no longer needed. The budget could be reduced by more than 50 percent [instead of just 16 percent] to maintain the present operating level of the budget.
So why then is the budget only shrinking by 16 percent? If 60 percent of the budget is no longer needed to build a new library, it seems to me that without a great deal of effort, the Library Board could have reduced the millage rate an equal amount or at least cut it in half. The millage rate was 0.5989 while funding construction; shouldn’t it be closer to 0.3000 now that the building is paid for instead of the 0.4999 approved by the Library Board?
Perhaps there is something else included in the budget that hasn’t been discussed yet. We’ll look at it next week.
R. Miller
Fort Myers Beach