Another side of the argument, from a link posted at the system's own web site. Though, since it's from the NYT, it's probably not worth reading.

Leaders of the campaign to eliminate the Stevens County Rural Library District say they are tired of paying property taxes for a service that helps people largely in the most out-of-the-way crannies, where a majority of the county's libraries lie. Besides, they say, rural libraries are increasingly obsolete, given the Internet, video outlets and discount bookstores.



Supporters of the initiative say they have gathered 2,800 signatures in a county of about 20,000 registered voters, far more than the 10 percent required to qualify the measure for the November ballot.

"With all the property I own, I'm probably paying up to $500 in taxes for the library, and that's just $500 wasted on something we don't need," said one supporter of the measure, Dave Sitler, a real estate agent.

Mr. Sitler, a member of the American Heritage Party, which calls for an end to all property taxes and for a government based on biblical tenets, also complains that the head librarian's annual salary of $51,000 is too high. "The salaries they pay those librarians, with health benefits and all that, it adds up," he said.

The Stevens County library system operates on a budget of a little more than $1 million a year, with a full-time staff of 10. It makes do in metal-roofed sheds, converted cabins and abandoned buildings. County records show that to help keep the county's nine book outlets running, the average household here pays about $38 a year in property taxes, the same as a month's basic cable television bill.

Without the library system, some county residents say, they would have almost no link to the outside world.

"I home-school my kids, and our four library cards are maxed out at 40 books at all times," said Linda Arrell, who lives off the electric power grid with her family north of here. "They say everybody is on the Internet, so we don't need a library. Well, some of us don't have credit cards, and some of us don't have power."



I love it: a master's degree, running 7 libraries in widely separated areas with patrons facing challenges that not one of the people on this board faces -- we all have electricity in our homes, right? -- and $51,000/year "with the health benefits and all that" (!!!) is too much? Because the area's median income is about $32,000? And that's for the boss. Everyone else gets less. Let's apply that logic to CEO paychecks before picking on people who serve the public.

Remember, please, that a payroll figure for an institution doesn't reflect only the take-home pay of the employees, but also medical and retirement, as well as mileage in the case of people whose job requires them to bounce from facility to facility. The library system's figures are posted here.

From another POV, do you think a couple of good-sized churches or a political party opposed to taxes might contain 2800 people? No petition rule says that the signers have to be a representative sample of the community.

I counted: these seven branches -- I haven't counted the other two libraries, which are faced not with closure but the reduction of their budgets by 30% and 60% -- are open a total of 136 hours/week, three of them 6 days/week. They are all closed Sundays, and they are all closed on just 7 other days a year (unless Christmas and New Year's fall on Sunday, in which case it's only 5). The system offers phone reference services from professionals during library hours, email reference for when they aren't open, online access to ProQuest (which is expensive to subscribe to on a million-dollar budget), and supports a toll-free number so that patrons can call in and not have it cost them a car payment to get a question answered.

The voters will decide. I just hope they realize they will have to make an effort to get to the polls.

$38/year for the right to take home thousands of dollars' worth of materials for free, get professional assistance in the search for information, have internet access without having the expense of purchase or the headaches of upkeep, and so forth. Tell you what: take that $38 to Barnes & Noble, and to the computer store, and to Blockbuster, and call up your ISP. Tell them all you want a year's worth of service for some portion of your $38. They will all thank you: a good laugh is hard to come by these days.

Nice to visit.

Mary Anne

PS-- Before we get into the "government puts a gun to my head" stuff, there are roads in this state that I will never use and from which I will derive no discernable benefit for which my taxes pay upkeep. They probably allow a half dozen farmers to stay in business, and contribute obliquely to the stability of my world. That's how that works: sometimes we pay (through taxes) for infrastructure we don't use so our world hangs together.