HAVERHILL LIBRARIES AND THE LAW

Funding for Adequate Service
Robert G. Fillion

New Hampshire law does not require a town to have a library but if it does have one, it must appropriate sufficient money to provide adequate library service, as stated in NH RSA Sect. 202-A:4: “Any city or town having a public library shall annually raise and appropriate a sum of money sufficient to provide and maintain adequate public library service therein or to supplement funds otherwise provided.”

Library law does not give any special meaning to the words sufficient and adequate, but this does not allow towns to disregard their meaning. Each town decides for itself what these words mean and must be able to state what a library must do if the town is to defend a claim that its library service is adequate.

Funding is sufficient if it can pay for all the programs that satisfy the collective demands of the town’s citizens. The proposed library budget each year should state the nature and scope of services that the library plans to provide. Citizens and officials in Haverhill have never stated what those services are. Currently no library budget states proposed services. In effect libraries do no planning, which is the essence of budgeting. The so-called library budgets are statements of goals that entail no concrete plans for activities and expenditures.

Libraries should have a mechanism in place to ensure that they know the community demands for service and that voters, selectboard, and officials concerned with the budget know what service they are buying. No such mechanism exists in Haverhill. No one considers whether the appropriated funds are sufficient for any particular level or type of library service. Discussions of library budgets do not come up at selectboard or town meetings. No one can state what constitutes adequate service or even what service the libraries have been providing. They do not report how they have met or failed to meet their goals. Consequently, no one is in a position to defend a claim that the town is meeting the legal requirement for a sufficient appropriation.

When the Haverhill selectboard (in effect, the town manager) sets the funding goal for library service does it without performance information. The leaderless libraries take no steps to inform the board. Voters in general are so disinterested that no one will question the board’s knowledge of the programs or activities for which it proposes funding or whether the level of funding that libraries receive is sufficient to ensure adequate service.

The board and budget committee have no idea of the affect that their funding recommendation will have on library performance. In fact, the board instructs the libraries on the funding goal before the libraries submit their proposed budgets. This renders the proposed budgets pointless, only a mere formality. The board sometimes even dispenses with the formality and includes an amount for a library that has “forgotten” to submit a budget. It has no interest in whether the libraries have any plans or not. Library budgeting and funding is a thoughtless process in Haverhill that denies citizens the opportunity to state their demands for library service. The selectboard has learned that it can make quite arbitrary library decisions. Inept and poorly motivated trustees do not raise their voices in defense of their budget or consider its impact. Trustees concern themselves more with whether they will be able to pay the librarian’s salary than with whether they provide adequate service.

Making Citizen Demands Known

The first step that citizens can take to ensure that libraries gear their programs to citizen demands is to install a mechanism for collecting and publishing relevant information, in effect a periodic needs assessments. This should be a standard function of the planning board, which conducts surveys of citizens when it develops town plans. The librarians are appallingly ignorant of town data or how to go about collecting it. They do not even have copies of the town plans.

The Haverhill planning board has abdicated its responsibility for library planning. It does not even notify the libraries when it is preparing a town plan or request library information. The libraries raise no objection to the board’s neglect. They shun not only the board but also the matter of planning itself. Nothing in minutes show intent to collect data whether for the planning board or their own budgeting process. They have customarily submitted line item reports of expenditures for the previous year that say nothing of activities.

The trustees do nothing, whether haphazard or systematic, to learn anything about the effectiveness of their service except for occasional requests that the very few people who use the libraries might informally offer. Untrained librarians, who have no notion of what the majority of people in town want and have no plans, develop library programs whimsically. The Woodsville library has quite succinctly stated a solution to the problem of meeting demands: “If you are not satisfied with the library, stay away.”

To improve library service, citizens collectively have to make known the service that they expect of a library. They have to develop guidelines for library service and communicate them clearly to trustees, selectboard, and budgeters so that they can prepare a meaningful budget for voters to act on at town meeting. The trustees or selectboard in Haverhill have never involved themselves in this practice and may never have to do it as long as the budgets are minuscule.

Dearth of Leadership

The town has no people who are knowledgeable of library science, and no citizen group, not even trustees, who act as “friends of the library”, i. e. those who organize themselves to express concern for the service made available to citizens. Community leaders shun the libraries. Trustees and librarians read no library science literature and consult with no experts. They keep no library science literature in the libraries.

Because libraries have so isolated themselves from the community, citizens have not been able to learn what libraries do or can do. They hide behind false claims that they are private libraries and do not have to provide citizens with information. Accustomed to libraries ignoring them, and lacking in library leadership, citizens are in a poor position to articulate their expectations. The Woodsville library trustees do not allow public input at their meetings. Frances Krauss, chair of the Woodsville trustees, is the only trustee of any Haverhill operating library that has been elected, but chooses not to learn or represent the public’s interest. She stated at a trustee meeting, “We do not want to hear from anyone who does not use the library.” She has excluded about 85% of the people of Woodsville. The Woodsville district meetings have elected her in what we would have to say at best is an election charade.

Trustees have until now never felt that anyone expected them to provide information, respond to citizens, or do anything else at all. The Haverhill library trustees went for 109 years without ever meeting and only met after they apparently became alarmed at the possibility of a citizen outside their little clique might exert some influence.

All libraries have refused to provide information as required by the state’s right to know law. The town can call upon experts from the state library to provide personally directed guidance or they can engage experts that the state library or a library association recommends. It has never done that. Town officials resist involving themselves in library matters.