Narragansett Town Council slashes funding to public library

NARRAGANSETT, R.I. (WLNE) –  At the second reading of the Narragansett town budget, three of the five council members voted to cut more than 50 percent of funding from the Maury Loontjens Memorial Library.

After the vote Monday night, Town Council President Matthew Mannix addressed the crowd of supporters, yelling ‘Mob rule!’

“I think a lot of people are shocked at what happened last night,” said Councilman Jesse Pugh, who did not support the reduction in funding.

The library is the 6th busiest in the state, with 10,000 visitors a month.

Now with the budget cut by almost $450,000, and loss of state funding of $181,000, they’re not sure where they’ll go from here.

“We’re going to use every penny we can get our hands on to try to maintain services,” said Library Board Chair Laurie Kelly.

The decision, Council President Mannix says, ultimately came from the fact that the library has $686,000 in reserve.

“That $686,000 should be used for operating, it basically should not be sitting essentially on a shelf,” said Mannix by phone. “If they choose not to use that $686,000, that’s their decision.”

But Kelly says even with the reserve, they would still be operating in the red.

“We’ll see what the year brings but they think we have plenty of money. It doesn’t appear that way to us,” said Kelly. “Perhaps we will have to close one day a week. We don’t know.”

The library says they’ll consider dipping into their reserves to keep operating normally, but that the reserves were meant for employee pensions, and repairs to the building.

Library services and people’s jobs are on the line, according to them.

“We don’t want to hurt the community by cutting services so drastically that it will hurt them too much, but we will have to look at some type of cut back.”

Many at the meeting last night were also upset there was no public comment or discussion on the budget allowed.

Mannix says it’s not required because they’d already had public hearings

However Pugh says he plans to file a complaint with the attorney general.

©WLNE-TV / ABC6 2019