AUBURN — Minot resident Erica Swenson visits the Auburn Public Library religiously. When her kids were little, they used to fill up a bag of books and take them home to see how many they could read that week.

“It’s just so heavenly to take out a giant bag of books and read through them with your children,” she said. “It’s one of my favorite things about being a parent.”

Having access to such a large library has helped instill a love of reading in her two daughters, a passion that was passed down to her by her own librarian mother. There is no way they could have bought all of the books they have been able to read through the library.

But she is concerned that library funding issues with the city of Auburn could limit or eliminate Minot residents’ access to full library services — should the library ask the town to more than double its annual contract fee.

For nearly two decades Minot, which has no library of its own, has contracted with the library each year to give residents access to all services and get cards for free, according to Lisa Cesare, Minot Select Board member and a library trustee.

The first annual contract with the library was around $15,000, Cesare believes, but it has increased yearly and this upcoming year’s contract is for $23,000. 

The Minot contract fee is more than what the library would get if the 308 active Minot cardholders were paying the $60 nonresident card fee the Auburn library charges, which would come out to nearly $18,500.

To Cesare, the agreement has been mutually beneficial: Minot residents do not have to pay for library cards and the library gets a certain amount of funding it can count on each year.

“We pay a one-lump fee a year to the public library, which is an awesome revenue stream,” she said. “They can count on it. They know what they’re getting, they can plan, you know, the use of that money, then our residents don’t have to pay for that non-resident fee.”

The library is a nonprofit entity independent of the city, but the city funds more than 80% of the library’s budget. The library operates out of a building that belongs to the city and the city funds capital improvements to the property. The city is poised to fund more than $1.2 million of next year’s library budget.

However, some city leaders think some of the library’s taxpayer funding is subsidizing costs for Minot residents and nonresident card holders. While city leaders are not telling library trustees they must raise Minot’s contract fee, leaders are reducing library funding by the amount they believe Minot is underpaying.

“Everybody recognizes the community value of a public library, without question, that’s not what this is about,” Mayor Jeff Harmon said. “This, for the city, this is very simple, and that is that subsidizing services for residents of other communities with Auburn taxpayer dollars is an inappropriate use of those funds.”

City policy states that no taxpayer funds can be used to benefit residents outside the city, Harmon said. By city calculations, neither the $60 annual card fee charged nonresidents nor Minot’s annual contribution cover the value of services to those patrons.

City leaders believe Auburn is covering services for those two groups of patrons by about $37,000: $31,208 for Minot and $6,383 for nonresident cardholders. For that reason, the city is proposing reducing library funding by about $37,000.

Leaders made several suggestions about how the library can make up the funds the city is not covering this year, including raising Minot’s contract fee to $31,000 and increasing the nonresident card fee to $176.

Cesare does not believe Minot residents would approve increasing the current contract fee at the annual meeting this year, she said.

If Minot stopped contracting with the library for services, residents would have to pay the annual nonresident card fee themselves to access Auburn’s full library services, but Cesare said there may be ways the town could help residents pay for that.

Harmon said the city calculated the value of services used by different groups of library patrons, including Auburn residents, Minot residents and other nonresidents.

Because the city owns the building and land the library is on, it agrees to pay for 50% of the library’s budget no matter what. So the city used half the budget, or $750,261, to calculate the value of services for each group of patrons.

The city chose the funding calculation most favorable to Minot residents, Harmon said, which was based on the number of cardholders. The city took the total number of active cardholders in each patron group and calculated the individual share each should be responsible for.

In this calculation Auburn represented 73% of active cardholders, Minot represented 7%, and other nonresidents 20%.

When the city multiplied the rate of active cardholders by $750,261, it determined Minot should be responsible for a total of $54,270 of the library’s budget, more than double the current contract fee for the town.

But Auburn resident and library patron Regan Flieg believes the city calculations do not take into account all factors.

FILLING THE GAP

Flieg takes issue with how the city is looking at funding. She argues that even if the library did not get money from nonresident patrons, costs to operate the library would change very little.

The library would still have to purchase about the same number of books, maintain a similar staffing level and provide the same services to Auburn residents. Without that patron funding the city would be on the hook for more of the library funding, without seeing operating costs go down in an impactful way.

She also thinks city officials are not taking into consideration the economic impact of nonresidents coming into town, shopping, buying gas and other things when they come to visit the library.

Harmon counters that it does not matter if operating costs would be almost the same without Minot’s contribution and nonresident patron fees. The city must follow its policies when it comes to taxpayer funds, he said.

The library board of trustees voted last month to continue contracting with Minot for services, but it was a split vote, according to library board President Rick Whiting. The contract is expected to come before trustees again.

Whiting says he does not know how the library will make up the roughly $37,000 less coming from the city, but the board did raise the nonresident cardholder annual fee by $5 to $65. He thinks perhaps the rest could be raised through donations.

But cutting services is not an option, Whiting said, because the city said if that happens it intends to make further cuts to library funding.

“That creates a death spiral, you know, you cut, then they cut, you cut, then they cut,” he said.

Whiting has been on the board for about two years and only recently was appointed president, but he has been active in library fundraising for many years. He has been looking at how other libraries charge their patrons and likes Bath’s Patten Free Library model, in which that library’s board determines the fee to municipalities instead of just accepting what towns offer them.

The library should be in the “driver’s seat” when it comes to town contract fees, he said. In the meantime, Auburn trustees are working on expanding the library’s endowment over the next several years to cover more of the budget. It would like to reduce the city’s contribution to 60% eventually.

It is a tough budget year for the city. Whiting, a former city councilor, understands that. But he knows library officials must also weigh how their decisions will impact the library long term, he said. The library has had a good relationship with Minot, but it may need to change the way it does business with the town in the future.

Should Minot or the library end the contract, that would increase the library’s shortfall by nearly $60,000. It is unclear if city leaders would consider increasing funding to fill some of that gap.

“One would hope, and I’m not sure it’s a realistic hope, that the city would take that into consideration before they finalize their budget,” Whiting said.

MORE THAN JUST BOOKS

Last Monday Swenson took her two girls to the library. They are older now so they pick out their own books and ask the librarians for help without her. They no longer enjoy the children’s story hour or the take-home book-based educational and craft kits curated by librarians or many of the other services that helped cultivate their love of reading

She hates to think that the opportunities afforded to her girls through the library when they were little may be cut off to other Minot families with young children.

Minot could probably never afford to operate its owner library offering even a portion of the services in Auburn, she said.

Swenson lived in Mechanic Falls and Poland before moving to Minot when her oldest daughter was a baby. She visited the libraries in those towns often, but they did not offer as much as Auburn’s.

So it was exciting after moving to Minot when she learned she had free access to the library in Auburn and all the services that come with it.

“When we found out we could go to the Auburn library, we were very excited because we had our eyes on this place,” she said.

Historically, the role of a library was to provide an equitable way for everyone in a community to access information and services. Years ago that was in the form of books and magazines primarily. Today, that includes computers, research databases, career counseling, family activities and more.

Libraries, especially those as large as Auburn’s, also play a vital role in civic engagement, said Flieg, who is a librarian at Lewiston Public Library. Towns and cities with public libraries tend to have residents who are more active in their communities.

“By having a strong library we help the community to be enriched, to be engaged with each other and more active participants in civic life,” she said. “Public libraries have a real strength in that if the community comes out and knows each other they’re more likely to band together.

“If they are reading materials, watching movies and documentaries, they’re also going to be more informed about the world around them and just more empathetic to the people around them, which gives us a more informed populus.”