HYANNIS — The Hyannis Public Library, facing what supporters call "crippling" budget cuts, could avoid further staff and material reductions if the town library committee agrees to freeze the facility's funding formula.

HYANNIS — The Hyannis Public Library, facing what supporters call "crippling" budget cuts, could avoid further staff and material reductions if the town library committee agrees to freeze the facility's funding formula.

The library is slated to lose $50,000 under the current formula, which local officials use to distribute town money across Barnstable's seven libraries. The town library committee adopted the new formula last year, planning to implement it over three years to ease the impact of the funding changes.

But a consultant hired by the town believes the formula unfairly burdens the Hyannis facility and should be frozen before further cuts sacrifice the library's future.

"The new criteria, with an emphasis on circulation statistics, are not reflective of the users and activity at an urban library like (Hyannis)," Nancy Rea, former deputy director of the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners, wrote in her April 16 report to the town. "(They) unduly penalize one library."

Three other local libraries — the Osterville Free Library, the Marstons Mills Public Library and the Cotuit Library — lost town funding this year under the first phase of the formula, which balances each library's circulation, hours of operation and population served, among other factors.

But none of the branches face the severe cuts threatening the Hyannis facility.

The Hyannis library lost $67,000 of town funding in this year's budget, forcing the elimination of two staff positions and the reduction of its book budget, which was cut by half, according to library director Ann-Louise Harries.

And if enforced, further cuts planned under the second year of the funding formula would likely require additional staff reductions, forcing the library to cut back on hours and programs, Harries said last week.

The Hyannis Public Library has a $500,000 operating budget drawn mainly from taxpayer money and the library's fundraising efforts.

"If we have to lose more people, there's no way we can be open the hours we're open now," Harries said of the Hyannis facility, which is open Tuesday through Saturday. "I don't know what we'd do."

Outside of Hyannis, five of the other village libraries stand to gain money if the library committee maintains the funding formula.

Based on the current year's funding levels, the Centerville Public Library would add about $17,000 to its $263,000 in town funding, according to figures from the town library committee. The Sturgis Library in Barnstable Village would add about $11,000, and the Wheldon Memorial Library in West Barnstable would add about $14,000 to its $88,000 in taxpayer money.

Some of the libraries including Wheldon Memorial are counting on the new funding formula.

"If the formula doesn't continue, we're at risk for closing our doors," Jenkins, of the Wheldon library, said yesterday. "We'll certainly have to look at our hours and operations."

Members of the town library committee, which is scheduled to discuss the funding formula at a meeting Tuesday, will consider freezing the formula if town officials agree to maintain funding levels for the libraries, according to committee chairman Mark Cote. The seven libraries received about $1.5 million from the town this year — a cut of about 4.5 percent from last year.

But town officials, still shaping their final budget proposals, aren't ready to ensure level-funding, according to Town Manager John Klimm,

"Obviously, this is not a year when we're adding to the budgets," said Klimm, who will introduce his budget proposal to the Barnstable Town Council in the coming weeks. "This is going to be a difficult year for everyone."
http://www.capecodtimes.com/article/20100429/NEWS/4290329
www.capecodtimes.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-13
54668
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:C7S6PBXF4LEESGBS2FWGF2QNMOFDE3MC
<urn:uuid:54797aa2-12da-4f2d-97b6-4e985708d62d>
2018-03-23T11:25:52Z
199.83.132.28
text/html
sha1:KHV6XBVKEZE34ZWMQSRIVY7YOYU6JZT2
<urn:uuid:5db09d32-801c-4770-81a0-41cd467558ba>
http://www.capecodtimes.com/article/20100429/NEWS/4290329
response
<urn:uuid:ea8e8852-0fa5-4c04-89c0-ef5ca9e3d05a>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-155-52-209.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-13
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for March 2018
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf