By Bob Seidenberg
Evanston Public Library officials are continuing to explore different options for managing mounting maintenance costs at the main building on Orrington Avenue, including one path that would entail separating from the city and becoming an independent district.
EPL Executive Director Yolande Wilburn briefed the board at its Feb. 19 meeting on a discussion she and Finance Director Sameer Notta held earlier in the month with Michaela Haberkern, the director of the Aurora Public Library, about that library’s own transition from a city-run library to an independent library district. Aurora was the most recent library in the area to do that, according to Wilburn.
“It was very enlightening,” she said.
The roots of that conversation stem back to last year, when EPL trustees grappled with how to pay for building renovations estimated at nearly $20 million and contemplated dipping into reserve funds to do it.
The library is responsible for upkeep of the building, with the city the owner of the property, in what Tracy Fulce, the library board’s president, described last year as a “very nebulous relationship with the city that has a cost to it.”
The two sides have been in talks since last year to develop a new memorandum of understanding that would clarify the responsibility that each party has for ongoing maintenance of the building, which opened in 1994.
Aurora made the jump in 2020
In Aurora, the library separated from the city (population 180,542 in 2020) to become its own library district on July 1, 2020, Wilburn said in her report to the board.
“The process began years earlier and involved some heavy lifting with regard to finance and systems but did not impact services to the community,” she said.
In 2016, the Aurora library system had a $10 million budget, and currently it stands at $17 million, according to Wilburn.
The library took that step because “the city kept cutting its funding,” she told the board about her conversation with Haberkern. “When the library bought land to build a new library due to aging infrastructure and a lack of support from the city to renovate their facilities, the village thought the library had been squirreling away too much money and reduced the levy. They did not want the library to accumulate reserves,” Wilburn wrote in a memo.
“Illinois library law allows you to separate by referendum or mutual consent, and in the end, the library and village mutually consented to separate,” she pointed out. “The process took one-and-a half years to complete.”
The cost factor
Wilburn reported other details she took away from the conversation:
- Aurora Public Library brought in a consultant, who analyzed the costs of getting services on the library’s own versus the cost of getting services from the city: “Communication with the alderpeople and mayor was critical to make clear services would not be cut during the transition.”
- Aurora library officials initially asked for a base levy to be set by the city at 18%, “which was very high but the funds needed to separate and continue operation,” Wilburn’s memo said. “After that, the library board has not increased the levy by more than the requisite 5% allowed by law. The county will reduce the amount if it does meet Illinois law criteria. The 18% still resulted in being less than 3% of the average property owner’s tax bill. They made clear how the average homeowner’s bill would be affected. Example: ‘This will result in an additional $30 per year on your bill.’”
“The one-time costs for the move were approximately $500,000; however, the ongoing costs now equate to about $120,000 per year,” she said.
The Aurora Public Library has 161 staff members, compared to roughly 100 at EPL. It also has its own human resources specialist, while EPL depends on services from the city.
The split was timed to coincide with a new union contract. “Lessons Learned,” wrote Wilburn. “You need someone highly qualified as they do the AFSCME contract negotiations along with an outsourced attorney. You must budget higher costs in contract negotiation years to cover attorney fees.”
Members of a previous EPL board made an intermediate move to an independent district in 2012, adopting a “library fund” model after years of the budget being lumped in with other city departments and subjected to repeated cutbacks.
The library fund model gives library officials the authority to form and approve their annual budget and determine their annual tax levy for library purposes.
The city as the corporate authority, though, still can reject the request and direct library officials to submit a different budget.
Examining separation costs a ‘logical’ move
Wilburn previously had reported her findings to the board’s Finance Committee, which recommended that she contact Meristem Advisors, the consultant for Aurora Public Library in its move, about the cost of an initial analysis regarding the library’s potential separation from the city.
Finance Committee members, however, did not recommend pursuing the separation at this time.
At the Feb. 19 board meeting, Wilburn, who opened nearly a half dozen libraries in her previous tenure as head of the Santa Cruz library system in California, said she had talked with a Meristem representative about putting together proposals for an analysis.
“I think there are a couple of things we would want to accomplish from this, just getting this analysis done,” she told trustees. “And one is — and it’s the big question both this board has and the City Council has had — what is the cost of the services that we’re getting from the city? How many people would we need to hire to do those services for ourselves?”
Responding, Fulce said, ‘’it seems logical to investigate the cost of separation, because we need to have an MOU with the city or an intergovernmental agreement or something. We need to know what those things cost irrespective of separation.
“So to me, it seems like a no-brainer to do the analysis, but I am curious about your insight about the separation.”
A value to the services received
“I think we have a pretty good relationship with the city,” said Wilburn, who was the board’s top choice in November 2023 after a long nationwide search. “But I do think I agree with you; it’s good to know what that number is.
“We get value by belonging to the city,” she said. “We do a lot of partnerships with the city. And so, again, I don’t believe this [exploring the issue] is indicative of saying, ‘Hey, we want to separate.’ That‘s not why we’re doing it. It’s really about both us and the city understanding the value of those services, and then also being able to say, ‘Hey, maybe if that one service you’re providing isn’t the standard that we need it to be, then maybe we can shop that one service and outsource it … or we hire our own internal person and provide that service.’ And that gives us a better perspective being able to accomplish what we need to do in an efficient and effective manner, instead of, ‘Hey, we’re waiting for the city to kind of come over here and fix that thing,’ — right?”
