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Atchison Library Requests Budget Increase

By David Meyer

06/10/2013

(KAIR) -- Atchison City Commissioners Thursday evening heard funding requests from their partner agencies at their first budget workshop of the season.

While most of the partner requests, such as the Atchison Chamber of Commerce and Heritage Conference Center remained the same, the Atchison Library asked for an increase of around 25 thousand dollars.

Of their 493 thousand dollar proposal, roughly 437 thousand is estimated to come from ad valorem taxes.

This would put them over the seven mill cap for that portion of funding that was instituted several years ago by the city and the proposal would also require an ordinance to raise the Library mill levy by City Commissioners.

Currently, the library receives 90 percent of its funding from the city.

Library Board member Donald Bratton describes how much the community uses that library.

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Bratton describes what would the increase in funding would go towards.

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Other funding increases would go toward in-house public access for ancestry dot com for genealogy purposes and a general increase in utility costs.

Commissioner Jack Bower asked Director Gary Landeck how the library would be affected if an increase wasn’t granted.

Landeck said he would have to cut out the cost of living increases of staff and tap into special funds to cover the cost of technology upgrades.

He stressed the point that in order to maintain the basic needs, the library is starting to outgrow the mill levy cap.

A reminder that only discussion and proposals are presented and no action is taken during budget workshops.

The next scheduled public budget workshop is June 20th from five until eight in the evening.

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