Now that the Embassy Square Foundation has appeared before the Henderson City Council’s finance committee, the H. Leslie Perry Memorial Library is next.
City Manager Eric Williams is inviting the library’s finance committee to meet with the council’s Finance and Intergovernmental Relations Committee next Wednesday at 6 p.m. at the Municipal Building.
FAIR Chairman Bernard Alston said the council needs to hear about the library’s operational expenses.
Williams and council member John Wester talked Tuesday night about the need to discuss the 50-50 split in local operational funds between Henderson and Vance County, but Wester said that’s not an issue for the library’s leadership.
Instead, library director Jeanne Fox and her board members will be asked to discuss the doubling of operational costs in the new, 40,000-square-foor library compared with the 12,600-square-foor facility now in use on Rose Avenue.
In its budget request for the year starting July 1, the library is asking for about $348,000 from the city, an increase of $98,000 from the current fiscal year, to cover the extra expense of the new library for the final four months of fiscal 2006.
“The bottom line is we can’t give them what they’re asking for, and they need to know it,” Alston said.