Salary was up due in part to the way it was budgeted last year
Created a larger managerial pool
We now have career paths
We hired more full-time staff
Interreach - more people out of the library, but we still need people in the library
We made librarians exempt
Overtime
Fine collection was down
OneCard
New borrowing policy
GO Bonds Passed
We will have to set aside funds for those projects
Question: Are we in poor financial shape?
Answer from Charisse: We are in good financial shape. We set aside 8 mil in reserves. We have accounted for the future well.
Comment: It would be beneficial to lay it all out for staff on the 2% increase
Answer from Kay: We can do that. The reason for doing the increase this way this year was to develop job competencies and have a better way to evaluate performance and award raises. The Singer group has been collecting information from us and they have sent out surveys to various companies to find out how other companies pay for similar roles. Singer is reviewing all these things to bring us their recommendations in December or so. We did it this way so we have time to budget for these changes in the next fiscal year.
Question: If we had budgeted last year the way we did previously, where would we have been?
Answer from Charisse: We would have been a little over, but not far off from previous year's budgets.
Training Needs Assessment – Michele
Michele stated that she knows there are training needs in the library system and she will be identifying the need and determining what training should be provided for the library system as a whole instead of 1 off training for certain departments.
The handout will be emailed.
New LMS - Milissa Copeland
Milissa advised there is a new Learning Management System called Edubrite that will be rolled out at the end of October.
Employees use their previous Metro U login and password. For new employees, the login is their email address with the @metrolibrary.org and the password is library1234