Voters, Not Town Officials, Expected to Determine PV Library’s Funding
With hopes of finally pushing the Putnam Valley Library into the 21st century, the library’s Board of Trustees is proposing the library’s budget goes straight to the voters this November, allowing them to make a spending plan determination instead of the town board.
Library board members and volunteers are gearing up to start collecting petitions to get a budget vote on the ballot for this upcoming election. While the town board regularly decides how much funding the library receives, on top of contributions from donations and also Putnam County government, library officials claim in order to become a more viable entity in the community, it must start going directly to residents for budgetary needs.
The technical term, Board of Trustees vice-president Terry Raskyn explained is a Chapter 414 that allows public libraries in New York the ability to place a funding proposition on a municipal ballot.
Right now, each Putnam Valley household assessed between $250,000 and $300,000 is paying six dollars per year toward the library, Raskyn said. The budget that the trustees are putting forth would be double that, at $12 on average for each household in town. As Raskyn puts it, “two cups of coffee and a pastry per year.”
Comparing Putnam Valley to Patterson, which is similar in population, Patterson’s library gets two and a half times as much money than Putnam Valley’s library, which has struggled to remain sustainable with such little money funneling in.
“What we’re asking for is very little,” Raskyn said. “What it’s going to give us is a whole lot.”
Board of Trustees president Priscilla Keresey said there are two major factors that contributed to the board’s decision to go straight to town voters. One is the Mid-Hudson Library System, which Putnam Valley is a part of, has been encouraging libraries to take this route, similar to what a school district does. Putnam Valley is one of the last libraries, Keresey said, in the system that has remained connected with the town budget.
Second, the library wants to offer more programs, services, and technology, which requires funding that the library knows it can’t request from a tax capped town board. (Last year, the town even voted to exceed the tax cap.) The library has received level funding from the town for several years, operating on an overall budget that goes back to the Richard Nixon presidency, Keresey said.
“We don’t necessarily want the town board to decide, those five, potentially three people of the five to decide what all the residents want,” Keresey said. “We want to offer these types of things and that’s going to take a little bit more money than the town is able to give us.”
Besides service and program advances, Keresey noted the library is also in need of more staffing, infrastructure needs, and other basic items that are found in any library across the county.
Keresey added by changing the way the budget is voted on, it would be equally beneficial to the town and the library. Simply put, Keresey believes town residents should have the final and absolute approval over what they would like to pay toward library services.
“A healthy library is at the center of a prosperous town and this has been shown,” Keresey said. “We are slowly strangling because of the budgeting process.”
Raskyn also stressed that while the library is seeking an increase this year, it would not be asking voters for an increase every year, as trustees have been able to run the library on a shoe string budget for years.
But Raskyn quipped, “We would like a shoe to go along with the shoe string.”
