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The Prince George Public Library will likely need to cut services if its full funding increase is not granted during city council’s budget deliberations, according to its director and board chair.
During the first day of budget deliberations on Monday, Jan. 20, director Paul Burry and board chair Anna Duff said the library was asking for $3,607,790 from the city in 2025, up from the $3,421,607 it received in 2024.
They cited added cost pressures like a 2.25 per cent wage increase for staff represented by the Canadian Union of Public Employees, increases to the library’s contributions to employee benefits, higher WorkSafe BC insurance premiums and higher municipal pension rates.
During a question-and-answer session with council Monday, Coun. Kyle Sampson expressed concern that the library had not returned to pre-pandemic revenue levels.
He signalled that he would introduce a motion during the second day of budget talks on Wednesday, Jan. 22 to reduce the library’s funding increase to around $80,000. Coun. Cori Ramsay also expressed some concern, saying she would introduce a motion to require the library to create a five-year financial plan to give the city some certainty about future years’ funding increases.
Sitting down with Burry and Duff on the morning of Wednesday, Jan. 22, The Citizen asked the pair about one of Sampson’s biggest contentions: The elimination of overdue fees. At the time the fees were eliminated, they were bringing the library around $80,000 in revenue per year.
The councillor said that the elimination represented the loss of a steady source of revenue and that the decision was essentially made without notifying the city in advance.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the PGPL was one of many libraries across the country to pause overdue fees.
A graph provided by Burry showed how much revenue was received from late, lost or damaged books in the years leading up to the elimination of late fees.
The amount collected was declining year over year from $90,333 in 2016 to $85,691 in 2017, $82,982 in 2018 and $79,905 in 2019.
In 2020, when overdue fees were paused, the library collected just $21,225 though it would have seen reduced activity that year due to the pandemic.
Burry said that with the library being forced to close for a time and uncertainty around whether the virus could spread through books handled by infected people, the decision was made to pause late fees so that patrons wouldn’t be punished for not being able to return their books during a situation that was out of their control.
However, Duff said, the library was already working towards the goal of eliminating overdue fees before the pandemic’s outbreak.
“Even in April of 2019, the board had asked staff into looking into what impact reducing or eliminating overdue fees would have on the library budget,” Duff said.
“It was already on our mind as a way to remove barriers to allow more people to borrow materials and engage with the library and to make us more welcoming to them and to meet people where they’re at with different resources.”
As an example, Burry said, they were hearing from parents that they were hesitant to bring their kids out to the library to check out books because they were worried they wouldn’t be returned on time and then they would have to pay fees.
“That’s not how we want the library to be used,” he said.
In October 2020, the library sent city council its funding request for the 2021 budget, including a letter explaining some of the changes.
Duff read from a letter sent by the board chair of the time dated Oct. 30, 2020 saying that the library had already planned to start phasing out overdue fees in 2020. With the temporary pause already in place, the letter said the library planned to permanently eliminate the fees in 2020.
She noted that the library did not ask for any additional funding from the city in the 2021 budget.
Despite the elimination of overdue fees, Burry said the library still charges a replacement fee for books that are lost or damaged, though those fees can be cancelled if a missing book is returned in good shape.
While it remains to be seen what the impact of not receiving the full budget increase would mean for the library at this point, Duff said it would mean service reductions of some sort. She said the library board tries to present a financially responsible budget with its funding requests before it gets sent to city council.
“The service levels that the library is providing is so important and we are seeing an increase in usage of borrowing, of visits to the library,” Duff said. “We want people, when they come here, they are feeling welcome, that they are feeling supported.”
On top of increasing in the amount of borrowing, Burry said the library set a record with more than 40,000 people participating in programming last year. That’s higher than pre-pandemic levels.
In-person visits and borrowing of physical materials is still recovering from the pandemic, but he said the amount of digital materials being borrowed sets a new record each year as well.
Last year, the library’s Bob Harkins Branch started to open for four hours each Sunday. Should the full funding not be delivered, Burry said it might prevent them from going through with their plan to add a staff member to work the youth desk on Sundays.
While there may be other ways for the library to diversify its revenue, Burry said it’s possible, but resources would have to be allocated to that purpose and take away from the services it provides to patrons.
Sources of revenue for the library include a grant from the provincial government, which Duff said has not increased since at least 2014, the city’s operating grant, a contribution from the Fraser Fort-George Regional District which is included in the city’s operating grant, one-time grants and fees for rentals, photocopying and printing.
On the city’s capital plan for the next five years are renovations to the deck that surrounds the main floor of the Bob Harkins Branch. Once that’s done, Burry said he believes that it will be a source of rental revenue for the library.
On the capital plan for 2025 is a replacement of the skylight at the same branch. Burry said there have been problems with water leakage in the current skylight, which means the art displays on the central stairwell get dripped on.
“It’s at the point where it can’t be repaired or replaced very easily because of how dangerous it is, because of the design of the skylight,” he said.
Asked what he would say to council as they gather for budget decisions later in the day, Burry said he understands how difficult it is to make them.
“Our feeling and what we try to do when we’re making presentation to council is to highlight all the many ways that we’re providing a benefit that’s helping this community improve,” Burry said.
“We talked a lot in the presentation about the homework help program which provides free tutoring services to people who maybe can’t afford to hire a private tutor to help their child improve their performance at school.
“These are the kinds of things that we want to highlight that we are doing to support the city’s strategic priorities and to … benefit everyone in our community right now whether they have significant financial resources of their own or not.”
