By Steve Plunkett
A months-long campaign of phone calls, emails and other gentle arm-twisting yielded a last-minute budget success for the Downtown Library: $60,000 for a new program services position.
Deputy Mayor Susan Haynie proposed adding the full-time library employee at the Sept. 24 final budget hearing after she and city council member Constance Scott found themselves amid a standing-room-only crowd at a recent Clyde Butcher photo exhibit.
“The current staff was really scrambling around to do it,” Haynie said. “There’s a huge public desire to attend such programming.”
Betty Grinnan, chair of the Library Advisory Board, was pleased to win the extra position. She, the board and the volunteer Friends of the Library started campaigning last spring to get $380,000 in past library budget cuts restored.
"All that effort produced something,” Grinnan said. “It’s a small bit of what we asked for, but it’s a beginning.”
Haynie also wanted to cut a $23,400 contribution to the Children’s Museum, which received a $125,000 bailout from the council in July, and give $10,000 each to the Faulk Center for Counseling and to Ruth Rales Jewish Family Service.
“All one has to do is look at all the tragedies that have occurred recently due to lack of mental health care in our society, so I think those are very worthwhile costs,” Haynie said.
Council members Anthony Majhess and Michael Mullaugh argued it would be unfair to cut the museum’s money because no one warned the nonprofit that the bailout would endanger its annual grant. Council members decided to give the museum $20,000 and take the Faulk and Ruth Rales contributions from reserves.
Thirty-one other nonprofits received the same grant awards as this year.
The budget tweaks did not change what is now the city’s final property tax rate, $3.72 per $1,000 of taxable value, the same rate as this year.
Because property values rose, property owners will pay 2.7 percent more on average.
City Manager Leif Ahnell, for example, will pay 1.9 percent more in city taxes, or $28, for a total $1,522. Last year he paid $1,494. His property’s taxable value rose under Save Our Homes even though its assessed value dropped 2.4 percent, to $541,730.
Boca Raton takes about 19 percent of a property owner’s overall tax bill. Palm Beach County, in comparison, collects roughly 24 percent and the school district almost 41 percent.
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