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Library Funding Fix Falters in West VirginiaWest Virginia lawmakers sent Gov. Joe Manchin a long-awaited compromise bill March 10 addressing public library funding for nine counties. Senate Bill 541 increases local school boards’ discretionary fund from 2% to 6% of their state revenue allocation so that they can continue to support public libraries without touching money earmarked for education. The support, which amounts to one-third of the operating budgets for the state’s largest county libraries, resolves the issues delineated in December when the state supreme court ruled that school boards cannot be forced to reallocate school funds.However, the compromise bill also contains a provision that the library community thought had been dropped. A loophole allows each school board to “move the library obligation” from a discretionary-budget line item to a county election ballot as an excess-revenue levy. A vote against using the discretionary funds for the public library would permanently void that county’s library-support statute, West Virginia Library Commission Secretary J. D. Waggoner told American Libraries. Although Waggoner noted that the effect of the provision “has moved what was a state fight to what will be a county-by-county fight,” he acknowledged that the loss of an excess-levy ballot “would put a huge hole in library service throughout the state.” Four of the nine affected library systems house the computer servers for the statewide online catalog. Before facing the prospect of excess-levy campaigns, libraries may find their fiscal fates back in court, however. Characterizing Kanawha County Library System’s Central Library as “a glorified homeless shelter” that doesn’t really benefit children, Kanawha County School Board member Pete Thaw said in the March 14 Charleston Daily Mail that the board’s lawyer was weighing whether to bring the issue back before the state supreme court. “We’re trying to get out of paying [for] the library,” Thaw admitted. Posted March 16, 2007. |
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