Voters in East Peoria are being asked to adjust the tax rate for the Fondulac District Library, but administrators say the requested increase doesn't actually raise taxes.
A referendum on the November ballot seeks approval to increase the district’s limiting tax rate from just above $.35 to slightly more than $.44, approximately one cent of every property tax dollar residents already pay. That amounts to about $4 per month for an owner of a median-valued home in the district.
However, library director Genna Buhr said the district is on track to pay off the building’s construction bonds ahead of schedule. The amount of the requested rate increase equals the bond issue portion set to come off the record, so the overall library tax rate would remain the same.
“We opened in 2013, and the voters approved those construction bonds in 2009,” said Buhr. “We are in a position now where those bonds are going to be paid off five years early, to the tune of about $1.2 million dollars in interest savings. That’s about 12% of what we were originally estimated to collect.”
Buhr said shifting the bond portion of the collection to the operational funding would give the library more financial stability as expenses increase.
“We can maintain what we’re doing for right now as far as services go, but we would not be in a position where we could continue to expand services — and our costs, like everyone’s costs, are going up,” said Buhr. “This would allow us to plan for the possibilities ahead, to make sure that we are not putting ourselves in a position where we would have a financial emergency.
“We of course know that our community values our collections, our facility and our services, and we want to make sure that we are putting ourselves in a financial position to be able to have stable finances and to be able to maintain and preserve what they value — and doing that proactively versus reactively.”
Buhr points out that the library did not request a tax increase for operations in 2009 when the construction bonds were approved, despite the move to a facility nearly three times the size at 32,000 square feet.
That’s required larger collections and more programming, services and staff to meet the needs, all while funding operations at the same tax rate.
“If this does not pass in November, we wouldn’t be in a position for any sort of service growth or collection growth or staff growth,” said Buhr. “We would start to have to make some tough decisions about the things that we’re able to offer in order to make sure that we can continue to pay for the things that we need.”
Additional information is available on the library district’s website. The district also has scheduled three informational town hall meetings to provide more details and respond to questions about the referendum. The events are scheduled for 6 p.m. Sept. 16, 10 a.m. Sept. 23, and 6 p.m. Oct. 5, all at the East Peoria Civic Complex.
