Library, city at odds over funding

PROVIDENCE—The Providence Public Library faces another annual deficit of about $1.5 million, and now it has failed to reach an agreement with the city on how to make the private, nonprofit organization sustainable.

The library relies on the city to provide more than $3 million every year to help run the system, which is currently operating on a reduced $8 million budget.

The rest of the budget comes from private donations and a state contribution of about $500,000.

“Over the past few years, the library has actually dipped into the endowment each year to subsidize the deficit,“ said Tonia Mason, of the Providence Public Library.

On that track, the $20 million endowment will run out. The library and the city are trying to find a way to make the system work, the library says, without increased funding from the city.

The mayor’s office released a statement saying the library has not lived up to its part of an agreement made last year that “required … (the board) ... to submit a sustainable plan ... and failed to do so.“

The library board said it did submit a sustainable plan.

“We would be reducing the number of facilities that we’d be operating. That would thereby reduce the deficit,“ Mason said.

The mayor says that’s unacceptable.

“He has continued to seek to preserve the 120-year-old partnership and has insisted on branch services that residents deserve,“ the mayor’s office said.

By charter established in 1875, the board of trustees is bound to keeping the Providence Public Library system going one way or another.