Excerpt: In many cases, it's need vs. luxury. And libraries are trying to prove they belong on the need side.
At least one Aberdeen man thinks they don't.
"(A library) is something that's nice to have, but it's not necessarily a need," said Sea Atwood, an Aberdeen man who runs his own business and ran for a spot on the City Council earlier this summer. "It does provide a lot of great things for the community, but if it comes down to making a decision on what we can afford and you put all the budgets up there, I think the library is somewhere you could trim the fat from ... The library, in my mind, is the low man on the money totem pole."
Luckily, for Aberdeen, it hasn't come to that. And City Manager Lynn Lander doesn't expect it to. Conservative spending over the years has put Aberdeen in a healthy position, he said. The library has a city budget of about $1 million - about 70 percent of which is salaries and benefits.
While many communities nationwide struggle to balance the budget by cutting services, Lander said he doesn't expect that to happen any time soon in the Hub City.
Now....what to make of this paragraph?
That's not the case in states like Montana, New York and Wisconsin, where big and small libraries have closed or slashed budgets to stay open. In New York, for example, public libraries have lost $18 million in state budget cuts since 2008, according to a story on poynter.org.
Roll call, please.
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