Support for Monroe Free Library's budget referendum

To the editor, I am proud to volunteer as a member of the Monroe Free Library’s Board of Trustees for so many reasons: The library’s impressive reading programs, its amazing Teen Force group, its dedicated staff that gives so generously of its time and talent, its director and assistant director who work so tirelessly to make a small, overcrowded library the best that it can be. All of this, combined with its stringent budgeting and sound fiscal policies, make the Monroe Free Library a town institution of which we all can be proud. Now the library needs your help and your vote for its 2006 operating budget. With Governor Pataki, once again, choosing to base statewide library funding for 2006 on outdated Census data from 2000 and with the cost of utilities and maintenance continuing to rise, the library must now turn to the community it serves and ask for an operating budget increase of $125,000, which amounts to an increase of thirty-four cents per thousand of assessed value. Cost to rent a DVD is about five dollars; cost for a movie ticket is about ten dollars; cost for a new bestseller is about twenty-five dollars; cost for a library that provides all of this and more for our whole town is very small cost and well worth it. Catherine Hilliard Member, Monroe Free Library Board of Trustees