Published: September 18, 2009 01:35 pm      

No justification for budget cuts to library system

There is simply no justification for the supervisors decision to so severely cut the funding of the Pearl River County Library system.

In their drive to balance the county budget, the Pearl River County Board of Supervisors cut the budget for the county’s library system, one of the most heavily used in the state, by more than one-third. Obviously, they feel no obligation to foster literacy and education for their fellow citizens in Pearl River County.

Libraries are one of the most important institutions in a free, open, literate and cultured society, as important to such a society as fire and police protection, for it insures literacy. Libraries are the repositories of knowledge, opinion and literature, both great and minor.

Libraries are used by students to do research and to find books that may be required reading or reading that would embellish and add to their knowledge on particular subjects. Today, they also are the connection to the Internet for those who can’t afford, or for some other reason, don’t have that connection at home. As in many communities, the Crosby Memorial Library branch of the county system has a room that many organizations use for meetings. Both Crosby and the Poplarville branch provide space for displays of cultural significance.

Linda Tufaro, head of Pearl River County’s Library System was devastated on hearing about the action of the supervisors. Her first concerns were for the people she said she is now going to have to cut and for the library patrons who are going to find access to the library reduced at a time when many need it most of all.

During poor economic times such as this, many use the library to help them find jobs, both by reading the want ads in newspapers they no longer can afford to purchase, and on the Internet using the library’s computers, after dropping their home access because they couldn’t afford that either when they lost their jobs.

Tufaro said the Pearl River County system has only 11 public access computers, which had 13,593 users last year. Use of those computers has grown steadily, rising 23 percent since 2004, the year before Hurricane Katrina struck. The last time the library system had a raise in its funding from the county was the year after Hurricane Katrina when funding rose from about $266,000 to the $274,600 a year it has received since then, including for the fiscal year just ending. For the coming fiscal year, that funding has been slashed to $174,000. Will this mean the closure, or partial closure, of one of the two branches? The library system had to shut down a branch it operated in McNeill back in the early 1990s because of lack of support from the board of supervisors then sitting.

By the way, there is a way the supervisors could provide steady funding for the library system so that it wouldn’t have to deal with it every budgeting cycle. State law allows a taxing entity to designate up to four mills for library support, which the Pearl River County Library System has requested since that became available sometime in the 1980s. Picayune provides two mills plus a portion of the Homestead Exemption funds to the library.

Crosby Library is the fifth most used library among the 243 libraries in Mississippi and Poplarville’s is the 50th most used, making the county’s system the seventh most used overall statewide.

The statistics concerning the county’s library system are extensive and will be reported more fully later. The supervisors were well aware of these statistics prior to cutting the system’s budget because the information was given to them at the time Tufaro made her budget presentation to the board. Either they chose to ignore them or they did not understand their significance.

In some societies, access to libraries is limited but in an open and free society such as ours, libraries are free for anyone to use because in such a society, we believe that knowledge and literacy strengthens us all.

By reducing the funding of the Pearl River County Library system, our supervisors have diminished considerably the ability to provide that knowledge and literacy we so desperately need.

What were they thinking?