Effingham County commissioners are trimming their financial support for the Live Oak Public Library System and want to consolidate the library’s services.

Commissioners approved a 10 percent cut for the libraries, reducing its funding from $316,000 in fiscal year 2010 to $284,450 for FY11. They also intend to further reduce the library’s funding by 30 percent over the next three years on a step-down schedule, much as they have done with non-government agencies such as the Chamber of Commerce, Historic Effingham Society and the Rape Crisis Center.

Commissioners also wanted to know just what services the library provides for the county and how those efforts could be better achieved.

“I feel like we should support the libraries,” Commissioner Verna Phillips said. “However, I think that is a very good question — what is their mission statement and is it overlapping other people’s mission statements.”

Said Chairman Dusty Zeigler: “We on this board don’t know exactly what they do. We don’t know exactly what we want them to do. Yet we continue to fund their efforts with money. I think this is another example of non-essential government.”

Christian Kruse, director of the Live Oak system, which operates libraries in Effingham, Chatham and Liberty, said they have met with county officials about the future of the library.

“We’re very open to working in any way possible to mitigate the cuts,” he said. “But we haven’t come up with anything concrete. We are going to talk in order to find something.”

Combined with the Effingham County Board of Education’s cuts — to $180,000 for next fiscal year from a current $360,000 — the two Effingham library branches are losing 35 percent of their funding.

“It’s a really difficult budget year all the way around,” Kruse said, “and we’re not sure what else we can do.

The Rincon and Springfield branches already are adjusting their hours. Currently, hours at the Rincon branch are 9 a.m.-8 p.m. Monday-Thursday and 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Hours at the Springfield branch are 10 a.m.-8 p.m. Monday and Tuesday and 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday.

Beginning June 1 — in anticipation of the coming budget cuts — the Rincon branch’s hours will be Mondays, 10 a.m.-7 p.m.; Tuesdays, 2-6 p.m.; and Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. The branch will be closed on Thursdays and Sundays. The new hours will mean a reduction from 60 hours of operation to 37 per week.

At Springfield, the branch will be closed from Friday-Sunday. It will be open Mondays, 2-6 p.m.; Tuesdays, 10 a.m.-7 p.m.; Wednesdays, 10 a.m.-2 p.m.; and Thursdays, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. It’s a reduction from 52 hours per week to 26 hours per week.

“You’re going to see significant changes in the hours,” Kruse said.

The libraries reduced their hours by 10 percent last year and it worked well, Kruse said.

Wired for use
From FY06 to FY09, the Effingham branches have had a circulation increase of 27.9 percent, 22.8 percent more visits and 17.5 percent more questions. But the biggest jump has been in computer use, from 52,286 in FY06 to 80,172 in FY09. It’s a 53.3 percent increase.

The bulk of the money the library branches has lost is in salaries, Kruse said.

“When the buildings are open, they’re very busy,” he said, “and we need to have staff in the building to service the public.”

In addition to more computer use, the branches’ WiFi also is being used more extensively. At both Effingham branches, the WiFi signal extends beyond the buildings, and the Live Oak system is trying to make sure the signal is on 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

“It’s not an ideal situation,” Kruse said, “but at least it’s something.”

Financial concerns have led some residents to give up their home Internet access and it’s meant more traffic on the libraries’ computers.

“Our computer use continues to go up,” Kruse said, “partly because of the economy and partly because so many more companies and applications are needed online. Online banking, health care. You name it and almost everything says, ‘go to our Web site.’”

But commissioners pointed out that job seekers can now use the Coastal Workforce Services’ One Stop Center to work on resumés and applications.

“We should have a plan for the library,” Zeigler said. “What I see is a lot of duplication of things. Folks come in there and use the computers for filling out resumes and applications. The Coastal Workforce already does this.”

County Administrator David Crawley offered the idea of creating a new center at Savannah Technical College’s Effingham campus and the school system’s career academy. Crawley also said the libraries in Greensboro, N.C., have gone to a fee system.

“It will take us quite a bit of time to work through those,” he said. “It’s going to take a lot of effort.”

The biggest crunch
There are 18 branches in the Live Oak Public Library System, with 14 of them in Chatham and two each in Effingham and Liberty counties. But it’s the Effingham branches that are most affected by the budget crunch so far, Kruse said.

The school board appropriated $400,000 to the libraries in FY09 before cutting that to $360,000 for the current fiscal year. That means the proposed cut is a 55 percent reduction from two years ago.

“The Effingham hit was so hard because so much of our funding came from the school board budget,” Kruse said. “We know that if the school board had not been facing such a fiscal crisis, they would have continued to fund us. They really didn’t have any other choice.”

The Live Oak system’s state funding is being cut by about 11 percent, and the library system still doesn’t know what its budget from Chatham County will be. The Liberty County Board of Education also is slashing its funding of the two branches there, Kruse said, but its level of support was not as substantial as Effingham’s.

Kruse said they will monitor their new operating hours in order to find the best times to open in their more limited time.

“We’re committed to providing the best service we can,” he said. “We’re looking for alternatives. Our hours are going to change in the short term. But as we move forward, every dollar that we find we’re going to place back into the hours so we can open the buildings as much as we can.”