Town deliberates library funding during ongoing budget discussions

By John Watson Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

The Town of Strathmore has voted to approve $385,000 in capital funding for 2025 to the Strathmore Municipal Library as part of ongoing capital and operating budget deliberations. 

Submitted as a 2025 community group funding request, the Library Board requested $425,698 of the town. For the 2024 year, a total of $377,000 was approved as funding for the library.

As currently approved, the increase in funding to the library represents a 0.98 per cent increase over last year.

In addition to the funding request, the town supplies the Lambert Centre to the library as part of the contract for services which was approved by council.

The library’s request of the town for funding was made in order to finance operations and wages of library staff.

Coun. Jason Montgomery motioned for the town to approve the $385,000 for the library through 2025 community group funding. 

“It is obviously not what they were looking for. I think the library does a lot of great things … when I was on my first term in council, we were approached by the library board and one of their concerns was they felt we were underfunding them,” said Montgomery. “We actually did a check into how much we are actually giving them and then also what other libraries get from other municipalities and I think at the time, just our per capita funding around then was $20 or $21 but what we realized was that did not include the in-kind services that we provide.”

Montgomery pointed out by comparison to other municipalities throughout the province, the Town of Strathmore makes comparatively large contributions to the local library. 

Coun. Melissa Langmaid indicated 81 per cent of the library’s budget is allocated for employee wages and associated expenses. Additionally, 11 per cent of the library’s budget is required to be transferred to the Marigold Library System as part of the Marigold Agreement.

That is what leaves eight per cent of the budget for operating purchases and capital purchases –that is things like potentially extra security in the winter, things like janitorial services,” said Langmaid. “The reality of the funding for the library right now is that wiggle room is not really something that they have. Reserves are not being significantly funded by the library – there is no significant reserve that they can draw from for operating expenses.”

Langmaid added the Government of Alberta provides a guideline of how many staff a library should provide based on the population of a given municipality and its surrounding areas. 

For Strathmore, this guideline recommendation by the province is 7.2 library staff based on surrounding local population. Currently, the Strathmore Library operates with six employed staff members.

“Employees of the library are, quite frankly, underpaid. Their wages are lower – they are lower than the average comparable wage at the town,” said Langmaid. “They are not competitive … when we are talking about families facing hardship, they are the families that could face hardship because their wages are just simply not high.” 

At this time, there is no Friends of the Library society that currently exists within Strathmore. 

It was suggested during council’s deliberations, the idea of a memorandum of agreement between the town and the library in future years for a more consistent funding model from the town as opposed to being granted funding via community group funding requests.