Letter: How About Funding the Jones Renovation with User Fees?
Front entrance to Jones Library. Photo: Hetty Startup
The Jones Library project is highly controversial but there’s a good way to reconcile people’s differences. Supporters believe that library improvements are a very high priority. Opponents disagree but maybe they don’t read that much, or they use Kindle, or support our local bookstores (not a bad thing), or use the UMass or Amherst College libraries, which are accessible at no cost to Amherst residents, or maybe they just believe that taxes are already too high;
Rather than continue to fight over it while the project costs escalate, a better solution would be to let those people who support the project pay for it through user charges; fees for library cards – and maybe late fees – set to raise enough revenue annually to service the added debt and fill the funding gap. (Okay, children could still get free library cards.)
Remember that we already pay for water and sewerage and rubbish collection through user charges and it’s hard to argue that sanitation and potable water are less important to the community than borrowed books and a space for teenagers to hang out.
There are at least two important benefits in public finance from user charges. First, they eliminate the tendency for people to be in favor of public spending projects so long as other people pick up most of the tab. User charges make people put their money where their mouth is. Second, they test whether a project is really worth the money, because if the beneficiaries together as a group aren’t benefiting enough to pay for it, it’s questionable whether the project is worth doing. So, instead of continuing to fight, why not shift the financing method so that everybody gets what they want?
Great concept !!!..I suggested to the Council a while ago the user fee idea along with finding a ‘like minded’ private partner who would commit to a long term tenancy, pay current market rates and invest in a maintenance fund.
One Council member responded that the Jones is a free community space and user fees would not be appropriate. Reality is nothing is free..this ‘free’ space is being paid for by Amherst taxpayers and a library endowment.
All this is such a perfect example of just how easy it is to spend other people’s money! And, how little our representative government really represents all town taxpayers.