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Politics & Government

Friends of the Evanston Public Library Members Walk Out on Library Board Meeting

Members of the group Friends of the Evanston Public Library, which has raised money to keep branch libraries open, rejected what they believe is a step backward in library funding.

At a meeting of the library's board of trustees that went on for nearly three hours Wednesday night,  community members stressed their support for the library system and urged the board not to back down on efforts to increase funding for the system.

The meeting saw the introduction of two new board members, Mildred Harris and Sharon Arceneaux, who were appointed by Mayor  Elizabeth Tisdahl at Monday's six-hour long city council meeting.  Wednesday's library board meeting marked the first one the two freshmen trustees participated in, and it focused heavily on the ordinance proposed at the city council meeting. Discussion of that ordinance was held off until Wednesday's library board meeting.

The board of trustees has pushed for a restructuring of their funding model for the library system, which has seen major cutbacks in the past year. The board decided earlier this year that it needed to invoke the taxing authority it is entitled under the Illinois Local Library Act. The law was created to provide a stable funding structure for library systems independent of local politics, and would allow the library board to set the library tax rate up to a certain amount and determine the use for the money based on what the community needs most. Similar models are used in Skokie, Deerfield, Naperville and other local municipalities.

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A number of elected city officials have decried the board's proposal, which they saw would pose an unfair tax burden on citizens. But members of the Friends of the Evanston Public Library stressed their support for the board Wednesday and urged the board, "don't capitulate to the city's ordinance."

Paul Gohschalk, the library's administrative services manager, introduced four possible budget options, as requested by the board at it's meeting last month. The proposals include one that would keep the branch libraries at the same reduced schedule they currently operate on, and maintain the same collections budget as the current fiscal year. In another, the reduced schedules would remain in place while the collections budget would be returned to the level it was at in the Fiscal Year 2009-2010.  A third option calls for restoring both the branch schedules and the collections budget to the higher levels they were at in 09-10. A fourth option looked at how the budget would operate were there to be no library property tax level and a number of reductions.

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Board member Diane Allen-Jacobi's motion to suggest that a model such as the fourth one be used as the guideline for the board to come up with a budget prompted outrage from several citizens, who felt that her motion was a step back from the progress that had been made.

"There are a lot of uncertainties in this whole process," she said of the proposed budget scenarios. "I'm very uncomfortable with some of these (proposed) increases."

A number of members of the Friends of the Evanston Public Library walked out in the middle of the meeting in disappointment as what they saw as a setback. Several voiced frustration that the newest board members didn't seem to have enough of a grasp on the issues to be voting on such a motion.

Following sometimes heated discussion, President Christopher Stewart eventually motioned for another meeting to be held on Sept. 22 at 6:30 p.m. to give members more time to discuss such an important issue. 

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