PARIS — Paris Public Library Director Mike Dignan said Wednesday morning that, as of July 1, the library will be forced to reduce its hours and eliminate a part-time position because of a proposed $18,000 budget cut.
Dignan said the 2015-16 budget is $180,035. The 2016-17 proposal is $162,035, or 10 percent lower.
“The Budget Committee and the Board of Selectmen both recommended the budget cut,” Dignan said. “We were originally asked to draft out what our budget would look like with 25 percent cut from it, but they ended up deciding to have a 10 percent budget cut across the board for every department in town.”
The $18,000 budget cut would be “split down the middle between staffing and collection expenditures,” Dignan said.
“There are some things that we have to pay in order to remain open, such as heat, insurance and electricity,” Dignan said.
Part of the cuts included eliminating a part-time position and 10 hours of staffing.
After July 1, the library will be open from 9:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday; from 9:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesday; and from 9:30 to 3 p.m. on Saturday.
“Since we’re losing 10 hours of staff time, and we try to always have two employees working at the same time, we’ll be losing five hours of being open,” Dignan said.
He said he is also taking a pay cut.
The rest of the budget cuts would come out of the library’s book purchases, meaning there would be fewer of them.
Dignan said that since 2009, the library’s budget has increased by about 15 percent.
“We’ve done everything we can to keep our expenses low and make sure we don’t submit budgets that are too large,” Dignan said. “We really haven’t gone up that much. It’s just the way things are.”
“I also understand that all of the departments are being asked to make sacrifices,” he said. “Right now, we’re just trying to make the cuts as painless as possible. However, no matter how we try, there’s going to be some pain.”
Voters will decide on the budget at the annual town meeting at 10 a.m. Saturday, June 18, at the Paris Fire Station on Western Avenue.
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