Call to order the Monroe County Public Library Board of Trustees meeting for May 21st, 2025. May I first get a motion to approve the consent agenda from the last meeting. Second. I have a quick note on the consent agenda. You may notice in the finance report the column headers on page nine of the packet, which is the monthly summary of budget categories, says April 2024 versus April 2023. It should read April 2025 since that's the current year. The numbers themselves are correct. It's just the column headers are a typo. Any questions before we vote? Okay. All in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed say nay. Okay. Ayes have it. And next up we have Greer with our director's monthly report. Okay. I know I typically lead off with comments on our circulation numbers for the previous month. Tonight I want to emphasize how strong our overall collection use has been over the past year. We are now almost as strong in overall circulation as we were prior to March 2020 when the pandemic hit and effectively curtailed access to physical collections overnight and in some cases recalibrated library patrons' approach to borrowing materials. And that's a milestone we should be very proud of. In particular, our digital collection use, which includes all e-books, e-audio materials, downloadable and streaming content, online databases, is higher than at any other time in our history outside of those early pandemic months when many patrons had no choice but to shift to digital use. We attribute this positive trend to a number of factors including thoughtful selection and curation of our collections both physical and digital, careful and strategic management of our physical collections on the shelves and on display, the excellent public service recommendations our staff provide patrons when looking for resources, our first rate marketing and promotion of those collections, and our community of library users and supporters who make borrowing materials from MCPL a priority for themselves and their families. I'm very happy to highlight the success of our collections and would like to thank the departments who make this happen, collection development, circulation services, all of our public services audience areas, our communications and marketing team, and our IT department for maintaining and enhancing our website and our online catalog and discovery tools. We have added a new type of read-along material in the form of vox and wonder books. These are physical books which come with built-in audio that has a simple and intuitive push and play function which triggers a recording of the text. We introduced these at all three branch locations and as of today we've had a total of 116 checkouts of these materials. We're receiving positive feedback from Southwest patrons about our new Steed library at that branch. We also held our annual seed swap in partnership with Mother Hubbard's Cupboard and saw strong attendance at the event. In addition to their normal monthly local meeting coverage and production schedule, our CAT staff worked with the City of Bloomington to formalize the acquisition, presentation, and archiving of specific city council committee and subcommittee meetings held in council chambers as required by Indiana House Enrolled Act 1167. CATS also began working on the new lighting system in Studio A which is our primary production studio for programs like CATS Week. April featured a number of local media stories on public libraries and literacy and in some cases focused on MCPL itself. Collection development manager Lisa Ciampelli, communications and marketing director Tori LaHorn, teen services manager Sam Ott, and myself all participated in one or more of these local interviews and we're glad to see that our community is paying attention to libraries and the principle of intellectual freedom and showing support for MCPL. Southwest teen librarian Kate Long is partnering with Jackson Creek Middle School's special education department to bring students to the southwest team space once a month as a special school day field trip. This gives students and teachers an opportunity to explore what our southwest branch library has to offer and reinforces our long-standing and very valuable partnership with MCCSC. One of our teen patrons shared a paper they had written for a school assignment with teen services manager Sam Ott and we included a quote from that paper in the director's report. I'd like to share that quote with you all. It reads, "The importance of libraries cannot be overstated. From the freedom they give all ages to the priceless knowledge they hold and the kind people holding it all together, libraries are a backbone of our society." As we celebrate the 10-year anniversary of our first dedicated teen space and as we continue to think about how public libraries can reach teens and young adults to engage them in reading, creating, and interacting with each other and with library staff, it's wonderful to see that our own teen patrons not only use and value our teen spaces as much as they do, but that they also reflect on these spaces and on public libraries in general as being crucial to society. Thank you to the MCPL patron who's shared this with us. And finally, with the passage of Indiana Senate Bill 1, we now know that the impact of reduced property tax revenue on our operating budget will be approximately $350,000 a year beginning in 2026. While this is far from the significant and worrisome change in operating revenue we were expecting, it does mean that we will have to make some adjustments. Our finance and HR teams have been working with us on a number of options which we look forward to sharing with you all and speaking publicly about beginning next month at the June board meeting and then again at the July meeting when we present the first draft of the 2026 budget. In the meantime, we've been meeting with staff and small groups to talk through what these adjustments might entail and how we'll work together to make them. As always, happy to answer any questions about the director's report. Two things, one I was when you made a comment about the Jackson Creek so is that MCCESC bringing the kids over or MCC or you guys so it's they are that's my understanding they're bringing the kids over to the teens so they're taking care of that transportation. We have a similar arrangement with another school and forgive me I want to say it might be Tri-North coming to our teen space here uh twice a month on a Wednesday I believe so yeah. I wonder I'm pleased that MCC is doing that. Yeah yeah it's been great. And the other throughout the report this I was reading it at home it was talking about some of the April's things are down a little bit here or there I was wondering do you ever compare year to year for that different social media stats and things like that because this time of the year with the students and everything's a very busy time and IU is finishing up and all that so I wondered if it was really very similar. So we do we completed that social media audit about a month or so ago and with that is us looking at year to year. Last April not just from month to month. Correct yeah so I don't have those stats with me but I'm happy to share them but we looked over the last few years of social media stuff. Okay I just didn't know if it was compared month to within the year or whether it was month in the past. We will sometimes highlight a significant jump from year to year given a particular month if we're looking at stuff like summer reading where everybody tends to be focusing on the same thing but usually we just do the month to month comparison but that audit we did on all of our social media accounts showed across multiple years. So I'll make a note and bring that some of that data to you all next month. Thank you. Any other questions or concerns? I don't know where this will lie on the agenda but I'm just curious to know does the board or does the public library and I haven't found it have a standing guidelines procedures for if ICE agents come into the building? Yes we do. We've been meeting with building services staff vital staff and public services staff about this for a couple of months now. So we do have a set of internal procedures for how to handle such a situation. It's not that different from if local law enforcement were to arrive with a couple of exceptions and so Brian Liebacher and myself and Josh Wolf and a few others have gone through those with the security staff and public services staff so that everybody knows what to do in the event of an ICE visit. Do you take an does the library take an active stance in providing information about know your rights to any of the patrons? We provide information on how to get that like we would any other resource so we don't encourage one thing or another we say here's where you can go to find know your rights related information. No but but staff are prepared to direct people to that info as they need it yeah. Is that a sticky wicket for this entity to do that since we take. Yes because if somebody wants to come in and ask a different question like how do I report someone who I think is here illegally we would need to provide that information as well. Kathy I can share a little bit as a vital volunteer also what was shared since we're working with people who often come from international spaces and into the library and and different than the library we were giving this as individual tutors but we were given access to information to be able to share if if asked by the people we work with. So you you as a volunteer for that program can share staff members can't share? They can direct patrons to where that information is but we don't have stacks and handouts to give to people. I'd like to see the guidelines or the policy or some see what it is because absolutely I just had a couple people in my neighborhood ask what happens if somebody comes into the public library an ICE agent. How do you know they're ICE agents actually do they show their badges? Yes and we we consulted with our attorneys on this question as well when the when the issue first arose a couple of months ago just to be prepared but I'm happy to share those with you. I'd like to see it yeah sure. Thank you. Okay we've got um do I have a motion to approve the 2025 fee schedule adjustment? So moved. Second. Okay so our fee schedule is approved every year at the December meeting and it includes updates to our plaque which is public library access card and subscription card fees. For 2025 we actually miscalculated the appropriate fee for non-resident subscription cards. We originally sought approval to increase that fee from $65 to $80. This fee adjustment is based on previous year expenditures and that adjustment was approved at December's meeting. However in consultation with the state library we understand that the annual fee should actually be $82 instead of $80. So we are asking to adjust the annual fee by $2 for 2025 in order to be in compliance with state library standards. My apologies I included the pre or the previous year's version of the fee schedule in the packet that actually has $65 in it so it's that's not the one we're talking about. We're going from $80 to $82 in order to be in compliance. Quick explanation of subscription cards versus plat cards. Plat cards allow a library patron to use any public library in the state and they cost $70 a year. In order to qualify for a plat card you actually have to have a library card with your own public library in your county of residence. A non-resident subscription card is specifically for use at our library and no other public library in the state. It costs $80 or now $82 a year and this option is for people who live in a county in Indiana that doesn't actually have a public library or for people who are here temporarily on sabbatical or something like that. So they're slightly different cards and for reference we have had about 77 non-resident subscription cards issued a year since 2021. We have a total of 25,431 non-resident checkouts since that year so an average of about 5,000 checkouts a year from non-resident cards. We currently have 59 non-resident cards but only 23 are active. That means that the other and I don't know I can't do the math but the other non-resident cards probably have items that are still checked out even though they've gone into expiration because they're good for a year or they have replacement fees associated with their cards and so we don't get rid of those cards until we settle those accounts. So we have 23 active non-resident cards right now and after they expire the the expiration date is rolling so it doesn't sync up with January 1 so when someone comes in to do a non-resident card their year starts that day. We do not have to retroactively charge 2025 non-resident cards an additional two dollars thankfully so it's from here going forward when we increase this to 82 dollars. Can I ask a quick question for the non-resident card just because I hadn't really thought about it before but when you apply at your county library there's that burden of proof for residents. When they do a non-resident card can they just come in and sign up? No I believe they have to approve where they live and meaning they don't live here in Monroe County. Okay yeah thanks yeah that would be an easy one yeah I'm not sure why you would want to come in and get a non-resident card if you actually lived in Monroe County but yeah well that I'm like since you don't live here do you even need to show like that was just like how do we go about that okay great thank you uh motion to approve the 2025 fee schedule adjustment oh sorry go ahead sorry I've been shy about asking because I feel like I should understand this uh you're explaining about the plaque card versus the um subscription am I missing something why would somebody not just get a plaque card right um am I understanding that right so it's a great question we talk about this all the time the cost differential suggests why would you get you know one versus the other the answer is if you if you don't have a library in your county then you're qualified to get a subscription card a non-resident card if you do you can't get a plaque card unless you have a library card with your county so you can either have a plaque because you're a library card holder with your own library or you can get a non-resident subscription because your county doesn't have a library but you can't do both or whichever one you want I guess okay yeah that's a great question actually yeah yeah yeah yeah okay thanks yeah any more questions or comments okay all in favor of approving the 2025 fee schedule adjustments say aye those opposed say nay okay all right may I get a motion to approve to hear about the resolution for surplus items second we're going to hear from Kerry so for this resolution for surplus items there's a list of several things here that are obsolete and in storage and we're running out of storage space so that's why we are asking to have these items declared surplus so we can get rid of them and I think that you know for this type of stuff I just talked to Brian but we typically look at organizations that might take these kind of donations first and then if we don't have any success there then they're disposed of up any questions am I right in thinking that teacher's warehouse has been mentioned yeah that's one of the organizations that we check with and then st vincent de paul would also be yeah I think that's the other one yeah those two are the ones brian mentioned any questions for gary okay all in favor of approving the resolution for surplus items say aye aye okay those opposed say nay okay thank you gary next we're going to hear from brian leibacher who is going to he's the director of building services to tell us what's happening hello my name is brian I'm the building services and security director here for the Monroe county public libraries so I'm going to quickly provide a brief overview of what building services is and building services consists of kind of three different sub departments that it's maintenance custodial and security when we talk about maintenance we're easily talking about the building grounds heating and cooling systems plumbing lighting electrical library vehicles and repairs to the buildings and many of the contents within the building custodial responsibilities include cleaning the interior of the buildings emptying trash processing recycling processing daily facility requests whenever somebody will submit a work ticket through our our internet system for example grounds cleanup of items that were left behind on our sidewalks and grounds emptying exterior trash as well custodian custodians are also usually the ones that run a daily route between our buildings so that is if there are materials here that somebody has put a hold on for example either out at southwest or Ellitsville we all those items are put into containers from our circulation services department and then someone from my department then we usually drive that out to the building and anything that is there that needs to be returned then we'll come back to this building and so we make that that route daily that we will drive out to Ellitsville drop things off pick up things come back here then go out to southwest rinse and repeat so that that is the the daily route it's usually about 10 to 20 crates that are full of books movies cds inter-department mails office supplies things like that and then finally security security job duties include enforcing the behavior policy oversight of our camera and door security systems opening and closing the buildings to the public and assisting with unloading patron donations and assisting with multiple deliveries throughout the day and making sure that those deliveries find their way to the appropriate departments the staff that make up these three kind of sub-departments not including myself there are six different job descriptions within building services these include there's one building services assistant manager who assists in the big picture coordination in the day-to-day oversight of these three departments one maintenance expert who maintains the physical integrity and safety of the library's facilities and equipment one maintenance technician who performs routine maintenance and grounds work eight security technicians who are mainly tasked with again with the physical security of the building and enforcing the library's behavior rules one security lead who is tasked with coaching and training newer security technicians and then again just providing coaching kind of throughout that and then 10 custodians who are responsible for providing clean and welcoming grounds and facilities for staff and patrons. Looking back at 2024 and into 2025 some of the major accomplishments that have happened kind of in the past year since I last reported we finished upgrading all of the door software systems at Ellitsville and that brought the door software that we use at all three of our buildings in line now they all operate on the same system so we can log into one system manage our door software and not have to log into different different systems. We completed a sidewalk extension and then added a bike rack at Ellitsville. We upgraded the downtown cctv system that filled in some gaps that we had on the exterior of our building and that also brought all three of our buildings in line using the same software so again now we can log into one one platform hop between the different buildings and then check out check out our security cameras. The other thing that's really nice about this particular software is that I'm able to access it from my phone so in the middle of the night if something unusual is going on I can just kind of roll over check my phone I can cycle through cameras I don't have to get up break out the laptop you know log in and wake up everybody in the house those kind of things. One of the other things we did this past year was we retrofitted the downtown staff entrance off of the parking lot to be automatic doors and this came as a staff suggestion we had a staff suggestion for accessibility it's not a true ADA door space kind of prohibits from it from making it a true ADA door but we were able to make that much more manageable for folks that have difficulty getting in and out that door. We're also looking to help circulation services here downtown and then Ellitsville staff in general stream streamline their workflow by revamping their office and work areas so here downtown we did a kind of a kind of a major overhaul to their to their work area where we had a kind of a built-in counter that went all the way around we took that out we put in a bunch of shelving that went in moved their desk kind of more to a central location and again just kind of really revamped their their work their workflow area that I think has helped a lot and again we're working on doing the same thing with Ellitsville in the next the next coming months and then I and the assistant director we co-led a policy review team that policy then the behavior policy review that came to you that you all voted on recently and so now Josh Wolf and I have been meeting with the different department groups and small groups and have been walk kind of walking them through some of the changes with that and some some implementation goals and strategies that they can use with that with that new thing all right one of the other things one of the handouts that you've got there in front of you it is the blue and green one of the other things that happen so looking at this document here we worked with a subcontractor for Duke called Michael's Energy and they gave us five thousand dollars basically to retrofit our existing equipment and what that entailed was we worked with an engineer from Michael's Energy who then in turn worked with the individual who does our software on our heating and cooling system here downtown and so that individual that does that software he is the one that actually got this five thousand dollars because he did all the heavy lifting here and in making changes from this engineer as a recommendation and so what they projected you can kind of look at the bottom line here total for all measures was in energy savings over 12 months of 24 000 lifetime savings of 173 000 and then of course there's also the benefit in just lowering our kilowatt hour use significantly and then also the amount of carbon dioxide that we're putting into the atmosphere as a result of energy use all right so that was their projected savings of what was what was going to happen on the next page if you look at the bar graph that is there if we look at the green bars those are 2023 the yellow bars are 2024 and then the blue bars are 2025 and so some of the interesting things here to kind of note if we look at if we look at the prior nine months okay so this is august 2023 again if you kind of on the first page we looked at this retrofit commissioning happened in august of 2024 so if we start in august of 2023 and we look through april of 2024 our energy use our kilowatt hours was a little over two million kilowatt hours and if we look at the last nine months then so going back to august of 2024 when this retro commissioning happened through april we don't have the may the may duke uh energy bill yet we've uh only used one million five hundred thousand so we've just in the nine months we have we have dropped uh five hundred thousand over a half a million uh so far kilowatt hours in that and looking at the savings in that time period it has been about eighteen thousand dollars that we have saved and again if so if you take that eighteen thousand dollars divided by the nine months that is an app that's the savings of about two thousand dollars a month which is exactly what michael's energy predicted what what would happen so so that that part is working the other thing that has recently happened um gary and i and uh jason met with a different subcontractor here just recently um and they proposed tweaking our system in a little bit different way um not reversing anything that we just previously did but doing something extra a little bit different and so the red graph shows um comparison now this is just one week so far in may the hashed line represents where we were at last year what our energy usage was last year and the more solid line indicates where we're at this year okay so in addition to the retrofit commissioning that we did through michael's energy making this additional tweak then um i'm expecting once we see our may and then especially june once we see those bills we're going to see that that number even go a lot better um that we're going to see our energy use go down and our savings go up on that so that will be something to look forward to in the next in the next few months the other thing i'll say is that looking at kind of the bar graph you'll notice that in the on the bar graph our energy use is higher in the summer months may june july august so cooling takes a lot more energy than what our heating does so we've started this at a really opportune time that we are going to hopefully see some of that savings as we get into our warmer months here and that our our cooling expenses are normally higher so hopefully that will again like i said be another another big savings looking forward to 25 and 26 a couple of things that we're working on right now as i mentioned we are kind of wrapping up this the policy review meeting in small groups so that they can better implement that whenever that that policy goes live and then we are also we are reviewing as part of the strategic goal number three we are reviewing and improving the existing incident reporting system that the library uses we have kind of a homegrown system that our it department has put together that has worked very very well for us over the years but there are other systems out there that will allow us to maybe run statistics a little bit better and to track things in a little bit different way provide provide more information to our frontline staff our librarians our library assistants and other folks that are dealing with patrons and so that is one of the things that we are reviewing right now it's kind of a large committee there's about 11 11 or so of us in this committee and we've reviewed three different products so far we've kind of completed our product review at this time and so in the next week or so then we're going to be reviewing those products and kind of making a decision on if we liked one of those products and we want to advise career that we want to move forward with that or if we want to go back and look for some more so we're going to be looking looking forward to that a little bit i'd like to thank you for your 24-hour service if you're doing that app phone thing because that means you never get to sleep so thank you for that so i'm assuming you really looked well to make sure that the new piece that you're putting with the michaels whatever is compatible i mean that there's that tweaking uh yeah so the the michaels energy that was for our heating and cooling system and what we're reviewing right now is more of a patron um patron tracking system or or or an incident report writing system so if somebody were to have a behavior issue at the library and we need to write an incident report about that one time about the red oh the one in the red yes yes i'm sorry yeah i'm sorry i was on the wrong page there with you yeah it is um and again it was just it was a minor tweak that we were able to do without bringing in the software uh consultant that does the software for our heating and cooling system it was it was uh low brow enough that i was actually able to make the change in the software myself so yeah yeah okay i appreciate that thanks for saving the money for us yeah trying i had actually a question about that and michael services um as a subcontractor contractor coming in when will it be reevaluated um as far as if there needs to be additional tweaking is this something like are you on a maintenance schedule with them or no no again this was this was kind of just a one-time consulting opportunity now that now that we've had a very positive experience with them i think we could reach out to them in the future it's some it's certainly something that they that they do this was something that you know duke had contracted them and had encouraged them to reach out to government agencies and municipalities and so that they could work to kind of help them out with their with their energy efficiency i will say duke has been very proactive with us over the past few years in reaching out with opportunities for us whether it's been lighting efficiency or anything like that they've been they've been very proactive to help us lower our our energy use love that they're working somewhere anybody have any additional questions thank you great work thanks for the update thank you brian and we do have someone online any questions comments okay just making sure we don't have any questions or comments okay seeing that we have no public comment do i have a motion to approve so moved second ending our meeting okay we are adjourned are adjourned okay our bills just keep going up (orchestral music) 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