How We Got in This Mess:

A Brief History
The Douglas County Public Library system was founded in 1955 at a time when the county’s general fund was fat with federal timber sales money. From 1950 until 1990 logging went on at the rate of 1 billion board feet per year in our county, one third of which came off of the 52% of the land that is in federal ownership.

A law enacted in the 1930’s reserves a portion of federal timber sales money for the use of counties in which the trees are sold and cut. Since the federal government pays no local property taxes it was decided that county governments should receive payments from the sale of federally owned timber in compensation. These payments amounted to about $40 to $50 million dollars per year and paid the lion’s share of funding for our schools and our county’s general fund and kept our local property taxes significantly lower than the statewide and national averages.     Following the listing of northern spotted owls on the Endangered Species list in 1990 logging on federal lands in our county declined rapidly during the 1990’s while the federal government faced law suits from environmental organizations and timber industry groups and our county government. By 2005 federal timber sales funding had dropped to about 10% of the pre-1990 levels.     The Douglas County Public Library system took its first budget cuts in 1997. Among other losses, we lost our system’s Bookmobile, a van that served our most remote communities in this large and largely rural county. From 1997 through 2007 the funding remained relatively stable as a so-called “safety net” allocation of federal tax revenue became a substitute for timber sales receipts. The legislation authorizing these emergency payments has always been time-limited, requiring renewal every five years or so. The latest round of payments was set-up to become smaller with each passing year in the hope of gradually reducing the county’s dependence on the years-long temporary funding. We are now in the final year of the current “safety net” money cycle, a year in which the payments have been reduced by 35% from the previous year. Congress may, or may not renew those payments this time around and, if they do agree to another four or five years of payments, those will be smaller yet than the already shrunken funds.     As the “safety net” has shrunk our public library system has shrunk along with it. During the first three years of cuts the system managed to keep the doors of our eleven public libraries open for virtually the same number of hours while their funding dropped from $2.1 million in 2007 to $1.7 in 2010. For the most part this was accomplished by laying off employees, putting off capital improvements and buying fewer books and publications.     The 2011 county budget has brought “the most unkindest cut of all”—a 21% cut leaving our public library system with $1.46 million in funding, greatly reduced hours of operation and a significantly smaller staff. As a result of this series of deceasing budgets our public library system has been reduced to the point where the needs of our families, friends and neighbors can no longer be met.