Another Denial of a Public Library Levy Request

Galesburg, November 2010: The Galesburg Public Library voted Thursday night to slash $20,000 from its earlier budget request in an effort to gain the City Council’s support in raising the library’s property tax levy. […] Relations between the city and the library have been increasingly strained due to disagreements on whether to increase the property…

Naperville City Council Asks Its Public Library to Make Cuts

An alert longtime CB reader took the time to send a link to a Daily Herald story about Naperville’s public library today: The library’s levy request of $12,450,000 for fiscal year 2012 was 3.15 percent, or $400,000 more than the previous year, but city council members asked the board to find and consider as much…

Library Finally Shows Up

DeKalb Public Library (DKPL) showed up for a dog-and-pony show at City Council last night, armed with packets of information that, once again, escaped being received and filed publicly by Council. The only conceivable reason for such a presentation is to rewrite the narrative of its dealings of the past three years into the meeting…

IPLARs FY2008-10

After the jump, see the table containing selected information extracted from three years’ worth of Illinois Public Library Annual Reports (IPLARs) filed by the DeKalb Public Library with the Illinois State Library. Included: information on revenues, expenditures, programs, attendance, resources/holdings and other numbers and answers I found interesting for one reason or another. Not included:…

IPLAR Form

IPLAR stands for Illinois Public Library Annual Report. I have received IPLARs for the past three fiscal years from the Illinois State Library. They are different from what the DeKalb Public Library has been sharing with the City of DeKalb in that the IPLAR form is 16+ pages while the information given to city council…

Library Annual Reports to the City

After the jump are the last three fiscal years’ worth of DeKalb Public Library’s annual reports. DKPL is obligated to provide a report to the City of DeKalb within a month of the end of each fiscal year, although according to an official with the Illinois State Library it is not actually statutorily obligated to…

Does DeKalb Have the Authority to Determine the Library’s Levy?

In the Daily Chronicle today, I see this: During Monday night’s DeKalb City Council meeting, McIntryre [sic] asked aldermen to not approve the library’s levy request. He said the library board did not receive approval to accumulate funds for the purpose of building or purchasing a site for a new library, which he said was…