A tumultuous year for Halfmoon Township might conclude with the township giving notice of its withdrawal as a funding municipality for Schlow Centre Region Library.
It could have far-ranging impacts on library services not only for Halfmoon Township residents, but also countywide, according to Schlow officials.
The Board of Supervisors has scheduled a special meeting for 7 p.m. on Dec. 26 to vote on an ordinance that would “withdraw Halfmoon Township from the Schlow Centre Region Library program… effective January 1, 2024.” A municipality that wishes to withdraw from the joint articles of agreement for the library is required to give 12 months notice to the library and Centre Region Council of Governments, so the township would need the ordinance to go into effect by Dec. 31 to remove its funding obligations for the 2024 budget.
Board chair David Piper said on Tuesday that, if passed, he does not “think support for the library is going to go to zero or anything like that,” but that he believes the funding agreement is “onerous.”
“I don’t mind supporting the library, but I don’t want to be forced to,” Piper said. “We have five elected officials in the township. The township supervisors should decide when the money should be spent and how much, not some third-party organization.”
He added that the supervisors could seek a renegotiated contract with the library but that he believes the current terms are dictated to the township and that supervisors have little say in how much they are required to budget annually.
“I can tell you any contract we sign with anybody from here on out, at least from my point of view, is going to be a fair and balanced contract where both parties have a say,” Piper said.
Lisa Rives Collens, Schlow Library director, said that as members of the Centre Region Council of Governments, Halfmoon Township supervisors do have a direct say in the library’s funding, through committees that determine a variety of budgetary factors and ultimately voting on approval of the library’s annual budget.
“They actually have a tremendous voice right now that they would not necessarily have if they were just negotiating with us directly,” Rives Collens said, adding that Halfmoon Township supervisors “didn’t have any questions at all on the library budget in any of the meetings that were available via the COG.”
Halfmoon Township has contributed to Schlow’s operating budget since 2003 and, along with the five other Centre Region COG municipalities, signed joint articles of agreement in 2008 and 2015 to provide financial support determined annually by the COG General Forum and based on use of the library by their residents. The funding formula accounts only for percentage of physical materials circulated by a municipality’s residents, and not use of digital materials or other resources.
In 2022, Halfmoon Township’s allocation for Schlow was $52,084, which averages to $18.67 per capita. The township also contributed $3,500 to the Centre County Library, which serves areas outside the Centre Region and which is separate from but intertwined with Schlow. For 2023, the township’s funding requirement dropped to $50,120. Supervisors also upped the contributions to the Centre County Library by $1,000.
Piper, however, said he’s concerned about the direction of the economy, financial difficulties facing EMS and fire companies that serve the township and needed road repairs. He also noted that supervisors cut real estate taxes for 2023 and that they “intend to lower them more in the future, not necessarily with library money.” He suggested that library supporters should make personal donations and that not all township residents should bear the cost.
Now and historically, Rives Collens said, economic downturns have made libraries here and nationwide more important to individuals and families who have to make difficult decisions about how they can spend money.
“They’re deciding that they can’t afford the internet and they’re coming to the library instead and using our wifi,” Rives Collens said. “They can’t afford for their families maybe different opportunities for their kids or programs or things that they would like to do for entertainment, for learning. Just when we are seeing increases in our usage because of that is when this funding decrease, or removal completely of funding to the library, would likely be impacting us. And that’s really unfortunate because it is kind of like the worst case scenario. Just when everybody needs you most you’re going to have less that you can share with everybody.”
What Would Be Affected
Schlow will receive $1.85 million for operating and capital expenses from the six Centre Region municipalities in 2023, but the loss of Halfmoon’s share could have cascading effects.
“If the library would lose such a significant amount of funding there would be a variety of services that we would need to evaluate,” Rives Collens said.
Some services are only provided to residents of funding municipalities. Those include resources such as remote book returns, including one at Brother’s Pizza in Stormstown; book pick-up lockers, including one launched earlier this year at Way Fruit Farm; access to the multimedia service Hoopla; and access to IT expertise.
“Those particular things we only provide to municipalities that provide us with resources, because they are sort of a second tier of service,” Rives Collens said. “They’re not just basic library service where you come into the library and you get a book off the shelf. There’s additional cost, additional staff that has to be borne and that’s really where we use the municipal funding to sort of bridge that gap for those type of services.”
The library would also have to evaluate building hours and availability of materials and resources, which would “ricochet” around the county, Rives Collens said. Schlow and the Centre County Library system form the Centre County Federation of Public Libraries, a coordinating effort between the two entities to provide high-quality library services throughout the county.
“We provide services; we move about 50,000 items throughout the county together with all of the public libraries throughout Centre County, so any impact on Schlow Library actually ricochets,” Rives Collens said. “We’re part of a bigger ecosystem… For example, if we can’t buy more copies of the latest best seller, that means that we can’t send those and rotate those through any of the libraries in Centre County.”
As a library district center, Schlow also provide services to libraries throughout a four-county area. The library also would need to work with remaining funding partners to determine acceptable cuts.
“We’re looking at a lot of different pieces of the puzzle that come together as part of that ecosystem that allow us to be the award-winning library that we are,” Rives Collens said.
Piper, meanwhile, said he felt Halfmoon Township is “held hostage” by funding agreements signed years ago. And he argued that the requirement to withdraw from the agreement by ordinance was “egregious and outrageous.”
“When the COG set this up with the townships, they knew it would be difficult to remove this contract,” he said. “They also knew that it would take supervisors with nerves of steel to sit there and listen to the pro-library crowd and get out of this contract.”
He called the agreement “just not a good contract,” and said “it’s time to negotiate, or renegotiate.”
A collective agreement with the COG municipalities is what has allowed Schlow to succeed, Rives Collens said.
“If we were to negotiate with each municipality, we would not be able to plan or save money in any multi-year contracts,” she said. “What we would be reduced to is really looking at every year, ‘Are we going to have enough to do X,Y and Z?’ So you can never really count on … ‘Well, can I pay my staff? Am I going to have enough funds to buy this database for the community the next year?’ You can’t negotiate things; you can’t do a five- or 10-year capital improvement plan, for example. All of those things right now are articulated, managed and have votes at the COG.”
Without a planned, joint effort, a library’s funding can also be left to year-to-year whims and what comes in one year may disappear entirely the next, she added.
“The reason why the area has the library services that it does is because we’re one of the few libraries that has this consistent level of local funding,” Rives Collens said. “That’s the difference. The other models don’t lead to that level of success.”
Rives Collens will be in attendance at the Board of Supervisors regular meeting at 7 p.m. on Thursday, when the library withdrawal is not on the agenda but is expected to come up during public comment, and at the special meeting on Monday. Both meetings will take place in the township Municipal Building, 100 Municipal Lane, and will be livestreamed on YouTube by C-NET.
The library issue caps a year for Halfmoon Township that included the departure of one supervisor because of a residency move and the resignation of the township manager after an unsuccessful attempt by several supervisors to fire her. Earlier this month, the board voted 4-1 to repeal the ordinance that established the manager position. Supervisors also considered — though ultimately did not — withdrawing from participation in C-NET, and faced criticisms for what some residents called an effort to avoid transparency.
