Mississippi Editorial Strongly Supports Library Service

Pacman for Libraries!

Link to February 23 editorial at NEMS360.com. (Thanks, Rhonda!)

Excerpt: Mississippi’s budget cuts – whose adverse impact on K-12 schools, community colleges and universities is reported almost daily – also strikes at a less noticed but popular and heavily used state-funded source of information and knowledge: public libraries.

Gov. Haley Barbour’s budget cuts so far have sliced $600,000 off the statewide appropriation for the network of libraries serving every region – and people of all ages.

That $600,000 cut, while small compared to the millions cut from other agencies, is arguably more quickly damaging to libraries’ ability to serve users because operating budgets have little room for adjustment.

State budget impacts in library systems’ budgets vary – based on the amount funded by counties’ tax sources.

In Northeast Mississippi the percentage of total budgets provided by the state ranges from 35 percent in the Northeast system (Alcorn, Tippah, Prentiss and Tishomingo counties) to 14 percent in the Lee-Itawamba system.