The Olds and District Municipal Library will have to find a way to operate with $20,000 less as the franchise fee, which is used to fund the library budget, cannot be raised any higher by the town.According to the library board's new chair, Cathy Hutchinson, the library is already understaffed and if the budget were to be short by $20,000, service could be scaled back further.“Potentially that means shortening hours, it may mean closing for a day, an extra day in the week,” Hutchinson said. “We're only closed on Sunday so those things would have to go to the board and it would have to be determined at that point in time.”Alberta Municipal Affairs standards state there must be 7.7 full-time equivalents (FTEs) for a patron base of the Olds library's size. That number is currently 6.7, Hutchinson said during a delegation at a council meeting last month.The library has not added staff since 2011, Hutchinson said. Since then, the number of patrons has increased since construction of the library's new building.The franchise fee is a levy that utility companies collect within communities on behalf of municipal governments.“So it's (a) revenue stream that we have to sort of offset some things that would otherwise be part of our property tax bill to residents here,” explained Norm McInnis, town chief administrative officer.Some of the money raised from the franchise fee goes toward funding the library budget.However, the amount the town can raise from the fee has peaked.“We didn't increase the franchise fee for 2014 so the revenue that we have based on the percentage that the franchise fee is currently, is maxed out,” McInnis said.The town calculates the fee as a percentage of what a utility company charges consumers.Any changes to the fee are made in November, McInnis said.“But there is a process. We have to notify the utility company whether it's ATCO for gas or Fortis for electricity well in advance and we have to do some advertising, let the public know that the fee is going to increase,” he said.The library is requesting $339,000 in tax revenue from the town, a $49,000 increase from 2013.Hutchinson appeared as a delegation to explain where the money would go.She said in years past, the library used reserves for its budget but those are now below requirements set out in a municipal bylaw.Library revenue has also decreased, with a $10,000 culture and community spirit grant no longer [email protected]
