Minutes (Summary) - 20091130 - AOG

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themselves if they are going to go this alone, in which case they calibrate the library in that regard, or do they get help from the county to expand the Chapel Hill Library, or do they move forward with their plans to build the Southwest Library. He said he believed they could have that discussion if the county coud tell them that they were open to reconsidering the Southwest Library. Commissioner Gordon said she thought it was important to recognize Chapel Hill's valuable service, and that they have provided library services to the southeast part of the county. She said if you ask when the Southwest Library was going to be built, it will be a number of years, so she believed what they needed to do, in the short term, was what Commissioner Nelson had suggested. She said they needed to figure out how in the next few years the county can give more money to the Chapel Hill Library for the operational expenses, and they should. She said if the county lost the services of the Chapel Hill Library, how would they replace that. She said she did not think they really wanted to come to an impasse where other people outside of Chapel Hill had to pay to use the library. She said she thought the fair thing was for them to sit down at the table, and figure out how they were going to increase the operational expenses. Council Member Greene said she agreed with everything Commissioner Gordon had said. She said she just wanted to point out that this is not like the school merger; the one crucial way is that 40 percent of the children of the Chapel Hill School System were not non residents of the school system. She stated that as Orange County Board of Commissioners they had a tremendous base of their constituents who were using the Chapel Hill Library, and if they were not demanding their level of service, they have at least come to expect it. Frank Clifton, Orange County Manager, said the staff had been working on numbers, and in attachment 13 it gives a history of the funding: in 1993-1994 when the sharing of funding started, the county gave roughly 48 percent of what it was spending on library services to the CHPL. He said in 2009-2010 it showed a big jump, because the new library was suppose to open this fiscal year; however, the numbers for Chapel Hill did not increase, and have fallen quite a bit. He said the county has no control over what Chapel Hill spends on its library, or what services it may choose to provide; what the County Commission does have is some basis of what it is willing to spend on its main branch as a comparison. He said any formula he would recommend to the county would be some percentage of what the county spends on its main branch, as an allocation back to Chapel Hill; and whatever they choose to do, in addition to that, or with that, is up to the Town of Chapel Hill. Mr. Clifton said he wanted everyone to understand that off the top of every dollar the county raises in the general fund, 48 percent of it goes to education. He said certainly the pace of the contributions from Orange County to the CHPL have not kept pace with the contributions to its main library. Council Member Czajkowski said they have all had these conversations. He said he believes that the decision they were going to have to make was to charge non-residents, if they were going to consider going forward with the expansion this spring; do they modify the library with the expectation of reduced demand. He said he believed from Chapel