ASHLAND —
The Boyd County Public Library Board of Trustees has set a budget for the 2012-13 fiscal year that reduces both the real property and personal property tax rate for county residents.
The board’s budget for the year that began July 1 reduces the real property rate from 14.7 cents (per $100 of value) to 13.6 cents. It also reduces the personal property rate from 20 cents to 13.91 cents.
The rates will allow BCPL to bring in sufficient funds to cover the library’s operating expenses in 2012 and 2013, director Debbie Cosper said. However, the $709,500 budgeted for capital improvement projects will come from the library’s reserve funds.
The operating budget this year is $3.62 million, about 83 percent of which comes from real and personal property taxes. The remainder comes from a combination of other state taxes and library fines and fees.
“This new rate will allow the library to meet its budget, but not cost the taxpayers as much,” Cosper said.
About 45 percent of the library’s budget goes to salaries, benefits and continuing education for staff; 25 percent to materials (books, media, periodicals and electronic resources); 20 percent to operating expenses like utilities, telecommunications, supplies, service contracts and programming; and the remainder to capital outlay for equipment, remodeling and technology.
In the materials budget, the ebook collection saw a massive increase over the previous year — a more than 800 percent rise. BCPL has 46,058 ebooks in its collection. The size of the overall collection actually went down, because library staff spent a lot of time cleaning all the missing, lost and out-of-date items from the database.
The number of BCPL card holders increased by 6.6 percent in 2011-12. There were 38,770 card-holding patrons at the end of June. About 80 percent of those are Boyd County residents.
The number of visits to the library’s three branches also rose last year, by 3.3 percent to 465,883.
The library checked out just shy of half a million items last year (485,104).
Other libraries borrowed 2,452 items from BCPL through the Interlibrary Loan program, and BCPL borrowed 2,444 from other libraries. “That makes BCPL a net lender,” Cosper said.
At the end of the last fiscal year, the library district had 65 public computers, which is 20 percent more than the year before. Those computers were used 35,187 times.
For more information about the library budget and tax, email Cosper at dcosper@thebookplace.org or all (606) 329-0518, ext. 1110.
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Boyd County library board approves tax rate decrease
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