Trustees To Decide On Risking Library Endowment To Cover Rising Building Project Costs
Architects rendering of the proposed renovated Jones Library. Finegold Alexander Architects. Photo: Jones Library
Jones Library News Highlights For The Week Of August 15, 2022
Disposition of Endowment To Be Voted At August 22 Meeting
In response to an estimated $13.6 million budget shortfall for the Jones Library Renovation-Expansion Project, the Board of Trustees will meet on Monday to approve leveraging the library’s endowment to cover the anticipated cost gap.
On August 11 Library Director Sharon Sharry outlined a scheme combining cost cutting, increased fundraising and spending from the $8.6 million endowment to bridge the projected budget deficit for the now $49.9 million project.
The spreadsheet she presented was not included in the meeting packet. Portions of it are reproduced below.
Sharry predicts that a little more than $8 million will come in from current fundraising efforts by the Library Capital Campaign. Nearly $5 million of this amount are from “in process” government grants and “planned” tax credits which are not guaranteed to come through.
She subtracted the current fundraising projection from the trustee portion of the total project cost to calculate the amount left to raise or achieve through cost cutting. Three different project cost estimates were modeled, based on the “Low” construction cost estimate provided by the project designer’s estimator, Fennessy Consulting, the “High” construction cost estimate from Town-chosen estimator Rider Levett Bucknall (RLB), and a “Medium” estimate representing an average of the high and low numbers. Fennessy is a cost management service provider out of Stoughton, Mass. with annual revenue reported to be around $5 million. RLB is a construction consultancy with an international presence employing 4000 people across 40 countries.
The model shows that the Trustees need to raise an additional amount between $9.2 million and $15.6 million.
To lower the amount left to raise, Sharry proposed a total of $6.5 million in cost reductions. She did not detail what design features might be cut except to say that cross-laminated timber construction, sawtooth skylights and historical preservation requirements would not be sacrificed. She felt that the escalation factor used by the cost estimators could safely be reduced, and that IT upgrades could be moved from the project budget to the Town’s capital budget.
Tallying cost reductions and fundraising projections, Sharry calculated how much of the Library endowment must be directed to the building project if no more money is raised over the next 4 years.
She concluded that the model’s “Low” estimate would require spending the endowment down to $5.9 million, leaving the Library’s operating budget subject to $90,000 in cuts due to a smaller annual draw from the endowment. The “Medium” estimate resulted in the annual operating budget being $210,000 short. The “High” estimate leaves the Library endowment with a negative balance.
Finally, Sharry presented a set of cuts that would allow the Library to manage a $90,000 decrease in its operating budget.
Library Capital Campaign Co-Chair Kent Faerber spoke to the Trustees optimistically about the Campaign’s prospects for raising additional funds and explained why he has been so motivated to pursue the building project.
“We’ve got a world-class university at one end [of town] and a world-class liberal arts college [at the other]. Why do we have a one-horse intersection in the middle? It’s going to take some sort of a turning point like this library to make this happen. I think there’s a lot of people in this town who really share this kind of vision for what might happen.”
Faerber went on to predict that the Capital Campaign can raise an additional $3 million, bringing the required endowment withdrawal down by that amount. “I can’t guarantee it, but you should fire me if I can’t,” he said.
A 2021 Memorandum of Agreement between the Library Trustees and the Town of Amherst lays out the financial commitment to the project by the Town and the Library. Any change would require Town Council approval. Additional financial aid from the Town may be unlikely, given a pledge made by Town Council President Lynn Griesemer in April 2021 when the Council voted to approve what was then a $36.3 million price tag for the project.
“I want to make sure you hear this message loud and clear. Let it be stated without equivocation that, as long as I have anything to say about it, there will be no more money than what we’re voting tonight. It’s all you get. And we will not favor you in future operating budgets. The Town will not allow cost overruns.”
The Board of Trustees will vote on a proposal to enter into a new agreement with the Town, pledging the value of the endowment to help fund the increased cost of the building project. Their meeting will take place at 4pm on Monday, August 22 and can be joined via Zoom.
The Jones Library Building Committee is expected to continue the discussion on August 23 at 4pm, also accessible on Zoom.
It appears that we are going to have to depend on the Town Councillors to save the Jones Library from its Trustees. It would never have occurred to me that the Trustees would even consider using the Endowment for this project. Their fiduciary responsibility is to say “Never the Endowment!” The rolling consequences of depleting the Endowment are hinted at in Jeff’s fine piece as well as the opinion piece by Art and Maura Keene.
But it seems that the Town Council already has given permission to use the Endowment as a guarantor of the library’s share of the cost. I had not been aware of this. The Town Council must revisit this right away.
Where will we be a decade hence if we allow the Trustees this irresponsibility? A bloated building with a reduced staff, to tend to it, reduced collections. This is the horse Kent Faerber wants to add to our impoverished town center which currently only has the Amherst Cinema, the Drake, the Strong House, Gallery A3, The Emily Dickinson Museum, Amherst College and the Amherst Books shop, restaurants, coffee shops and the splendid Hills Houses surrounding our “one-horse” intersection. Our downtown does have needs, but another oversized building is not one of them.
The sad thing, as so many have said for so long, is that this is both unnecessary and undesirable. The library certainly needs renovation and I have always supported a small expansion to accommodate programmatic needs as well as staff needs. The Trustees could easily move in this direction and have virtually the whole town behind them. The money they would lose from the MBLC would be money that they would no longer require.
To risk the Jones’ endowment is a very dangerous proposition.
The Jones has been running on a shoestring for decades. Witness the fact that the library relies solely on the Town’s Joint Capital Planning Committee and the Community Preservation Act funds for all capital improvements to the building even though the Trustees own the facility.
The Trustees have not been able to afford even minimal upgrades. Note the use of forty-year-old wooden LP record storage for inefficient housing of CD’s to say nothing of the horrible condition of the 30-year-old carpet. Nor have the Trustees figured out how to adequately preserve Special Collections after four disastrous leaks. No effort was made to find off-site climate-controlled storage. The collection languishes under plastic tarps.
The Jones struggles every year to pay its approximately 23% share of the library’s total operating expenses. The Town pays the remaining 77%. One example of funding challenges occurred in May 2018. Director Sharry approached the Friends of the Jones’ Library for $19,000 for an emergency payment for books and materials’ purchasing so that the library could maintain its state funding. If the endowment is decimated, the Town will have to jump in and provide more money for such “emergencies.”
The proposed increase of $3,050,000 fundraising plans is a pipe dream. To rely on possible federal and state earmarks for our town library is dubious as other towns who have received MBLC grants have not had to do this as their building proposals were a size that more appropriately fit their towns’ populations, which the Jones demolition/expansion plan does not. And such a large proposed National Endowment for the Humanities grant is a stretch.
Some of the potential cuts for the “Low” model to save $90,000 include $30,000. This is essentially the entire yearly programming budget. ( See Amherst Library System Budget Request FY2022 (joneslibrary.org) p. 5 How can the library be a community center without programming? And note that $13,000 will be taken out of the North Amherst Library budget. How will that upgraded facility be properly maintained? It won’t.
If the library can’t support itself now, it will not be able to function with a large building.
I’ll add that I did not see an unnecessary big-ticket item cut from the project in a recent article by Jeff Lee. New Estimate Sees Library Construction $11.6M Over Budget. Trustees Consider Pledging Endowment To Cover Gap – Amherst Indy It appears that the automatic book sorting machine, estimated at $400,000 in 2016 and requiring a yearly as yet undisclosed maintenance contact, is still in the plan. ID tags for this system (the tags alone once estimated at $50,000) will be put on the books before they are packed up pre-construction. This extravagance should taken out the plan “tout suite.”
This huge financial gap reflects the even greater “reality gap” that the Jones demolition/expansion represents. Yet even if we pretend that this reality gap does not exist, the Jones $8M endowment is still too small — and arguably irresponsible to use — to cover the financial gap.
Exactly one institution in Amherst has a large enough endowment — nearly 500 times the Jones endowment! That means 2 mils (.002, or a fifth of 1 percent) of its endowment would cover the gap.
Can that world-class institution “spare a mil or two” to help?
Would someone please ride a bike — or a horse — across Amity Street to ask them, tout de suite…?
If anyone does, it should be for support regarding the basic and necessary services that town employees provide to the town/campus.
The idea of touting a show-piece (non-town owned) library while public servants work in 100 year old buildings (DPW, AFD) rife with black mold, at scavenged desks in a garage with no heat or air conditioning and under a regularly leaking roof just defies understanding.
James Murphy
Agreed, Jamsey, agreed indeed!
Isn’t it about time to get our priorities straight?