Library Millage To Remain Status Quo

millage to remain status quo<br><br>Library<br><br>■ Proposed budget marks end to fiscal crisis.<br><br>By SUSAN L.OPPAT<br><br>NEWS STAFF REPORTER<br><br>The Ann Arbor District Library millage won’t go down this year, but it won’t go up, either, and it’ll pay for three new branch I 'dings over the next six years.<br><br>The library board was given a proposed $9.49 million 2001-02 budget Monday. It marks an 11.9 percent reduction from last year’s figure, and an end to the library’s fiscal crisis.<br><br>“This is a huge deal,” said board Treasurer J.D. Lindeberg of going from a $1 million deficit to a $3 million surplus in one year. Cost-cutting and a one-year millage Increase did the trick, enabling the library<br><br>to pay off a $1.5 million loan taken out to recover from a deficit^aused by poor management under former finance director Donald G. Dely.<br><br>Revenue will be down in the fiscal year beginning July 1, because the board will reduce the current 1.95 mill operating levy to the 1.65 mills it collected from Ann Arbor taxpayers before the $1 million deficit was discovered in early 2000.<br><br>The board is likely to continue to collect the other 0.3 mills to build the branch buildings. The board is authorized by voters to levy up to 2 mills.<br><br>There are savings in the budget. With the end of the financial crisis, legal and accounting fees are expected to drop by $37,000, or 35 percent.<br><br>“The treasurer is happy, the comptroller is happy. And the comptroller is hard to<br><br>please,” Lindeberg said of comptroller Ken Nieman.<br><br>Nieman’s proposed budget includes a $245,000 contingency fund, reinstates staff training and travel budgets, increases program funding by 148 percent and allows maintenance and repair work to resume at all branches, Lindeberg said. That work has been deferred for the past 18 months.<br><br>The budget assumes that property tax revenues, accounting for most of the library’s income, will increase just 3.5 percent, a figure Lindeberg said was “excruciatingly conservative.”<br><br>Aside from the recovery, Lindeberg said he was pleased that Nieman came up with budget projections that allow the library to build three branch buildings without increasing taxes, something board members didn’t think was possible even before<br><br>the financial crisis.<br><br>The plan is to build a new branch every two years for the next six. While planning she years out is “painfully close to voodoo,” Lindeberg admitted, current projections allow for construction, the additional staffing the larger buildings will need and maintaining a minimum $1.5 million fund balance, or “rainy day” fund, Lindeberg said.<br><br>Most of those years, the projections will allow a fund balance of $2.5 million-$4 million. Even the lowest projected year, 2004-OS, includes a balance of more than 10 percent of the budget, more than is recommended by accounting firms.<br><br>“We never came into this thinking we could (pay cash to build) our branches. We thought we’d have to go to the voters. Our ability to keep operating costs under 1.65<br><br>mills, as we’ve shown we can do, is great. It means we can do our expansion, which badly needs to be done, with existing authorized taxes,” Lindeberg said.<br><br>The proposed budget is available on the second floor of the main library, at 343 S. Fifth Ave. A public hearing on it will be held at 8:30 p.m. May 21 in the fourth-floor meeting room. The board is scheduled to vote immediately after the hearing.<br><br>In other business Monday, the board agreed to pay $25,000 to Westgate Enterprises to settle a lease agreement for the former Rite-Aid space in the Westgate Shopping Center, which the library optioned but failed to use.<br><br>Susan Oppat can be reached by e-mail at soppat@annarbornews.com or at (734) 994-6823.