LIBRARY FINES GOING UP

These changes will become effective July 1, 2010:

What are the changes?

Overdue books will be $0.25 a day instead of $0.10 a day.
The maximum late fine for one item (not including rentals and ILL's) will be $10 instead of $5.
The maximum fine for OVERDUES ONLY will be $35, instead of $25.
Cards will now be blocked at $20 in overdue fines, instead of $15.
Interlibrary loans will cost $3.
Replacement of lost or damaged library cards will cost $1. (It is NOT necessary to replace your current card and new patrons can always get a free library card.)
No longer 2 free copies from the computer printers.

JMRL has always relied on state funding for our book budget. In 2000, the state aid budget was $843,725. This year, with the latest decreases, state aid will be about $600,000. In terms of books added to the collection, we added almost 52,000 volumes in 2000-2001, in 2008-2009 we added just over 25,000, meaning we got less than half of the material that we got 10 years ago.
Local budgets are stretched to the limit across the board, and cannot be expected to make up the large difference mentioned above.
JMRL needs an increase in revenue in order to continue to provide the high level of selection and availability of materials that we have provided for the last 38 years. In fact, the last fine raise (to the current $0.10 level), was in 1979. For comparison: In 1979 a first class postage stamp was $0.15---now it's $0.44.
Postage costs run JMRL tens of thousands of dollars annually, and the ILL fee should help to cut down these costs.

One of the goals of the current JMRL 5 Year Plan is to figure out a way to decrease the waiting lists for new/popular materials. More fine money for our materials budget will help to purchase more copies of these items.
To be able to continue our outstanding service that had led to 100,000 registered users and over 1.6 million check-outs a year.
Higher fines will encourage more timely returns and greater turnover of the collection.