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Keep Our Libraries Open 1

published by rmbell on Fri, 04/15/2011 - 17:28

 



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keep our libraries open...
Vol 1 Issue 1 June 2011
Library Hours Cut

Below find the hours that the branches are open this year and the projected hours for next year:

Library Branch 2011 2012
Headquarters 40 24
Canyonville 22 16
Drain 22 16
Glendale 22 16
Myrtle Creek 38 24
Oakland 18 16
Reedsport 38 24
Riddle   22 16
Sutherlin 38 24
Winston 38 24
Yoncalla 22 16
 

"The America I loved still exists, if not in the White House, the Supreme Court, the Senate, the House of Representatives, or the media. The America I loved still exists at the front desks of our public libraries."
- Kurt Vonnegut

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DC Library in the News

The News-Review - NRtoday.com

Staff Column: Not so quick on cuts to library services- Bill Duncan - June 9, 2011

Editorial: Visiting speaker a literary treat for Douglas County - May 18, 2011

Residents ask to save library hours  - May 5, 2011

Energy Spotlight: Library, UCAN open chapter on energy savings - Jim Long - April 3, 2011

Editorial: Library inspiring new readers — one word at a time - March 10, 2011

Read all about it: Douglas County Library system among the best - March 3, 2011

Guest Column: Let's pay up to save our libraries - Robert Leo Heilman - Feb 16, 2011

Douglas County Library supporters propose tax district funding - Feb 8 2011

Editorial: Libraries offer much more than stacks of books - Sept 3, 2010

Douglas County Library system to face further budget cuts - Aug 22 2010
 
Who We are...
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Welcome to the future...

Due to reduced federal funding Douglas County's support for our library system has been steadily diminishing. Each year, for the last three years, the library support funds have been reduced by 10%. This year the library has been serving the community with roughly 30% fewer resources. There have been staff lay-offs, fewer book and media purchases and reduced library hours in all the branch libraries. However, this coming year the budget will be once again cut but this time by 21%. This leaves the library with about 50% of its former operating dollars. The result is that all the branches will be open fewer hours per week,  staff will be reduced, and some services eliminated. In short, next year our library system will be manning all the branches with a skeleton crew and often be simply closed. But, bad as this may seem, it's not the bleakest future. At the end of June 2012 there is a very real possibility that the entire Douglas County Library System will be disbanded for lack of funds - completely closed down. Though no one can predict what this will mean to your local branch library, I'm confident that each of our local library branches will be severely crippled without the resources of the county system.

How We Got in This Mess:
A Brief History
The Douglas County Public Library system was founded in 1955 at a time when the county’s general fund was fat with federal timber sales money.  
    From 1950 until 1990 logging went on at the rate of 1 billion board feet per year in our county, one third of which came off of the 52% of the land that is in federal ownership. A law enacted in the 1930’s reserves a portion of federal timber sales money for the use of counties in which the trees are sold and cut. Since the federal government pays no local property taxes it was decided that county governments should receive payments from the sale of federally owned timber in compensation. These payments amounted to about $40 to $50 million dollars per year and paid the lion’s share of funding for our schools and our county’s general fund and kept our local property taxes significantly lower than the statewide and national averages.
    Following the listing of northern spotted owls on the Endangered Species list in 1990 logging on federal lands in our county declined rapidly during the 1990’s while the federal government faced law suits from environmental organizations and timber industry groups and our county government. By 2005 federal timber sales funding had dropped to about 10% of the pre-1990 levels.
    The Douglas County Public Library system took its first budget cuts in 1997. Among other losses, we lost our system’s Bookmobile, a van that served our most remote communities in this large and largely rural county. From 1997 through 2007 the funding remained relatively stable as a so-called “safety net” allocation of federal tax revenue became a substitute for timber sales receipts. The legislation authorizing these emergency payments has always been time-limited, requiring renewal every five years or so. The latest round of payments was set-up to become smaller with each passing year in the hope of gradually reducing the county’s dependence on the years-long temporary funding. We are now in the final year of the current “safety net” money cycle, a year in which the payments have been reduced by 35% from the previous year. Congress may, or may not renew those payments this time around and, if they do agree to another four or five years of payments, those will be smaller yet than the already shrunken funds.
    As the “safety net” has shrunk our public library system has shrunk along with it. During the first three years of cuts the system managed to keep the doors of our eleven public libraries open for virtually the same number of hours while their funding dropped from $2.1 million in 2007 to $1.7 in 2010. For the most part this was accomplished by laying off employees, putting off capital improvements and buying fewer books and publications.
    The 2011 county budget has brought “the most unkindest cut of all”—a 21% cut leaving our public library system with $1.46 million in funding, greatly reduced hours of operation and a significantly smaller staff. As a result of this series of deceasing budgets our public library system has been reduced to the point where the needs of our families, friends and neighbors can no longer be met.
 
 
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Library Futures Committee of the Douglas County Library Foundation

Company - 123 Some Street, City, ST 99999. Ph +1 4 1477 89 745

 

 

 

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