City councilors voted last week to add a part-time position to assist the city’s director of economic and community development while cutting back on Walker Library’s staffing request at the committee’s recent meeting May 24.
Although the library would gain a full-time reference librarian, councilors voted against a request for a full-time circulation director.
Other relatively minor cuts were made without much contention, and two social service items received minor increases over what had been proposed in Mayor Bruce Chuluda’s budget. Councilors voted to reduce a cut – from $19,400 to $11,000 – Chuluda had proposed for Home Health Visiting Nurses. Councilors voted to give the agency $15,000, and Councilors voted to give Community Counseling a first-time funding of $1,000.
Some projected revenues also increased after being adjusted to match historical trends, such as the revenues from parking fines, which are also expected to increase due to a part-time parking management position that may be created for next year.
The budget will be going back to the committee for another review before it gets put before the council for final review. The committee was hoping to send the budget to the June 4 council meeting, but will instead be in committee again on June 6.
The committee is working to find cuts in the budget and to identify increased revenue in order to pay for recycling programs – including a curb-side recycling program and a new push to recycle at municipal offices – but the programs were not discussed in detail at the May 24 meeting.
The new part-time economic development assistant was requested to allow Director of Economic and Community Development Erik Carson to focus on grant writing, business retention and business expansion. Carson said at the committee meeting last week that the number of development grants he can apply for and manage would be increased with the added office assistant.
“I’m very glad,” Carson said after the meeting. He said that in recent years promotional marketing has helped establish Westbrook as a part of Maine’s biotechnology hub. The assistance position will allow him to help him attract more business and industry to Westbrook.
Although the Walker Memorial Library director is expecting to get additional staff members, the library will continue to operate below the recommended minimum standards put out by the Maine Library Association and approved by the state’s library commission.
Michael Miles, chairman of the Walker Library’s board of regents, told the budget and finance committee that the association’s standards formula recommends almost 10 full-time library staff equivalents for a community of Westbrook’s size. Westbrook is operating with slightly more than six full-time equivalents.
“We’ve had a lot of cuts over the past years,” said Karen Valley, Walker Library’s director. “We need people.”
The Walker Library had 54,900 visits in the 2005-2006 fiscal year, and circulated 53,363 items. But Valley has said that the faces of libraries are changing, and Walker Library “has been run in a very old-fashioned way.”
“Modern libraries are structured in very different ways,” said Valley, noting the goal to join the MINERVA network, a single-stop library computer system connecting more than 85 libraries around Maine.
Some committee members expressed unease in cutting the library’s requested positions, but in an effort to keep the tax burden down voted to fund one of the two requested library positions.
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