Saturday, May 18, 2019

Wilmette Library Trustee report - my attempt at local public service transparency

Welcome back to my old blog...I'm restarting this one as an attempt to bring some transparency to my service as a Trustee of the Wilmette Public Library.

About once a month, probably before each Board meeting, I intend to post my thoughts and comments on the upcoming agenda. We'll see how I do.

An interesting reason why I am doing it this way on a blog is because it is illegal for an elected official to email his or her colleagues with responses and ideas about the upcoming agenda item. The Open Meetings Act requires all public deliberation to be done in public, but that makes for the natural collaboration in a group (which is what elected officials really do -- group decision-making) really difficult. Technology allows people to communicate largely in writing in really convenient times, and allows the public and taxpayers to follow along when it is convenient for them. Unfortunately, state law hasn't quite caught up to this so we are stuck collaborating only in person and that's a challenge to find the time to do that as a volunteer (at least, it's a challenge for me). Thus, the blog.

So, two years and halfway in to my term as a Library Trustee, here are my thoughts.

1. We have a huge capital reserve (called a Special Reserve Fund) and a huge operating reserve. Our annual budget is about $5M and we have $17M or so in the bank, about evenly distributed between a capital fund and an operating surplus. The library has been raising more money than it spent every year for a long time and I hope this year we finally end this practice. I also hope we can move some of our annual operating budget into the special reserve fund by allocating budget items from the operating budget to the capital budget (basically, if state law allows the library to pay for something like building maintenance out of our special reserve fund, then we should). That will reduce our annual budget and allow us to reduce our property tax levy.

Every month the Board approves all the checks written in the last month.  The agenda for the next board meeting is on the Library website here. A few checks, to me, look like they could be spent out of our capital fund, not the operating fund, that come out of the Building Maintenance Contracts or Building Maintenance line items ($2100 for Hill Mechanical Services, $1100 for J.T. Home Refurbishing), a Security System Maintenance line item ($2100 for Central Technology), computer equipment since "equipment" is an authorized use of the capital fund under state law as I understand it ($7500 for Cooperative Computer Service) and some miscellaneous equipment maintenance and equipment furnishings paid from what looks like a Chase card for about $11,000. All these are on Item 5 of the agenda which I hope you can download here.

I've asked for clarification on whether we can use our abundant capital funds to pay for these expenses. My read of state law is that it is a Library policy whether to assign these expenses to our capital Special Reserve Fund or whether to pay them from our general operating budget, since we set up our own Special Reserve Fund and state law is fairly open as to what you can use to pay for it (so long as it is capital related and not something like a book or a heating bill). I hope to get a clear answer soon and hopefully the Board will determine that we ought to pay our capital expenses from our capital fund.

2. Interesting proposal to keep a current contractual relationship between the Kenilworth Public Library District (which doesn't have a library) with Winnetka/Northfield and Wilmette. The proposed cost for Kenilworth taxpayers to be treated as residents for both Wilmette and Winnetka/Northfield is $282,889 a year, plus inflation. Why that number? I don't know. I love the idea of intergovernmental cooperation. But I'd like some more background as to whether that's the right amount. It's on the agenda for approval next week, which seems pretty fast to me. Hopefully we can push off a final decision until next month at least to get more discussion and background. By the way, I'd love to use the Kenilworth Metra station as a library facility, since the ticket agent has been pulled from this historic old station. Would be nice to have a library staffer there to sell tickets and check out books. Right now it is unstaffed and that's not ideal. I'd like that to be part of the discussion and the contract. You can read the proposed contract as Attachment 10 and hopefully download it here.

I'm sure there's more, but getting some thoughts out early Saturday morning in writing before the Board meeting Tuesday night will hopefully advance our public deliberation.





No comments: