ST. CHARLES—The St. Charles City-County Library (SCCL) Board of trustees listened to proposed cuts to the fiscal year 2026 (FY26) materials budget in order to help fill vacant positions. These potential cuts could increase customers’ wait times for holds at the library.

What You Need To Know

  • A proposal for the Materials Budget FY26 was presented to the St. Charles City-County Library Board of Trustees this week that would slash nearly $400,000 if approved this summer

  • If passed, the plan could result in customers seeing longer wait times for library items on hold

  • Two databases for research and resources would also be dropped

  • The library's salary and benefits budget take up the largest portion of SCCL's budget to the point they couldn't hire some key vacant positions in FY24

These proposed cuts are due to SCCL needing to address budgeting concerns. In the current Fiscal Year 2024 (FY24), which has a quarter to go, the budget shows that salary and benefits make up the largest portion which has SCCL over budget by $386,920. The board anticipates being overbudget by $500 thousand in salary and benefits by the end of FY24.

“What we’ve done to control that is not hire some key people,” said John Greifzu, CEO of the Board of Trustees, when speaking how they’ve countered being over budget. “We had a couple manager positions not filled. Also, some LA1s and LA2s associated with MK had not been hired as well. So, we’re running close.”

To help lift the burden of salary being over budget, they’re under budgeted in discretionary expenditures including operations in technology and capital. While they are confident, they’ll be within budget overall by the end of the fiscal year, the personnel concerns weigh heavily.

Enter the proposed Materials Budget draft for Fiscal Year 2026 (FY26).

Carol Schrey, SCCL Director of Collection Services, shared with the board the draft that proposes reducing the Materials Budget by 6.97% which would be $306,500 reduction.

Schrey said the library network saw continued growth in digital resources such as hoopla for audiobooks and e-books which led to increased expenses for SCCL.

“In general, we trend up for hoopla use,” said Schrey. “So, in calendar year 2023, we had about 14,500 active patrons and in calendar year 24 for hoopla we were up to 17,494 patrons. So, we increased a little over 21%.”

Also, Kanopy grew for customers checking out movies and television shows. Both digital based systems use a cost per circulation model that requires the library to pay each time something is checked out, whether or not it’s read/listened to.

The proposal calls for a total decrease of $25,000 or 3.33% of hoopla and Kanopy expenses to decrease the number of monthly checkouts.

SCCL customers are currently limited to 10 checkouts per month in hoopla and 30 tickets per month in Kanopy. Library staff are reduplicating the collection of popular titles in hoopla and turned off the top 500 titles if the title was in Overdrive/Libby.

A larger chunk is being proposed to be taken from Overdrive/Libby. Of the 110,000 active card holders, 37% use overdrive. The proposal calls for a decrease of $120,000 towards overdrive expenses for e-books, which would be a 13.87% decrease. They’re also looking at a decrease of $50,000 or 11.2% to the e-Audiobooks with Overdrive.

Right now, the e-book collection includes 53,157 unique titles, 41% of which are on a metered license or subscription model. Just recently, in FY24, the library spent $125,000 repurchasing some of these subscriptions/metered license digital products.

One example of the e-books SCCL has frequently re-upped is “The Nightingale” by Krisitin Hannah. It was released in 2015 but remains in high demand with 149 active holds. SCCL has 14 additional copies of it this year, estimated to cost $60 each for metered use over two years.

Earlier this year is another example, the popular hit by Rebecca Yarros, “Onyx Storm.” The third installment of Yarros’s Fourth Wing book series was released in late Jan. 2025. SCCL purchased 150 digital e-book copies and saw an immediate hold list of 1,003. Currently, 150 holds remain. Of the 58 print copies purchased, cardholders have taken home the book 185 times and eight holds remain. SCCL bought 11 one copy to one use e-Audiobooks of Onyx Storm and 100 simultaneous user copies too. Those have been checked out 1,662 times with 68 holds remaining. The three audiobooks on CD copies of Onyx Storm have only been checked out eight times: signaling Audiobooks on CD aren’t popular to customers with digital download in existence.

“There is no alternative anymore really for a digital audiobook. That is the audiobook, that’s how it lives,” said Schrey.

Of the 25 upcoming books, 23 have a higher pre-release hold digitally than the print version.

Overdrive doesn’t set a per-use cost like hoopla but goes by a contract of time offered.

“Overdrive is better for us than hoopla,” said Schrey, speaking to the costs. “The average cost per circulation is much lower. The average cost per circulation of audio books is significantly lower. It’s just it’s that one person at a time model where hoopla has that instant gratification and has the bigger selection.”

In FY25 to date, Schrey’s calculations showed circulations from Overdrive costs the library $1.02 on average whereas hoopla averaged a $2.19 cost per circulation. E-books for Overdrive were $1.09 per circulation but $1.58 for a circulation from hoopla. Audiobooks for Overdrive were 94-cents per circulation and substantially higher with hoopla at $2.55 per circulation.

Wait times for books on the Overdrive/Libby collection will see substantial increases if the proposed cuts are approved. The current average waiting period is just over 29 days.

“We are sitting at 29.15 days so about a month,” said Schrey. “We really don’t want our customers to have to wait on average much longer than that. A month is pretty lengthy. If we see that creep up because we’ve change the hold ratios, we’re going to have to review that and see if there are alternatives and ways we can get that wait time back down.”

Adult and teen books are proposed to decrease by $13,200 or 1.91% and youth books by $5,250 or 1.39%.

Music and audiobooks checked out within the library are proposed to decrease by $11,200 or 24.51% but the expenditures for these have been dropping for years.

Budget toward movies is proposed to decrease by $51,250 or 20.75%

The last materials budget item to take a hit in the proposed cuts is the Reference and eResources which are used for homework, research, genealogy and more. They are proposing decreasing this item by $20,150 which makes up 4.54%.

Specifically, the draft plans to drop two databases. One is the Gale and Context Elementary research database because SCCL has other research databases for students. Also, they plan to drop the demographic resource database as it has “ceased to exist” and would need to be replaced nevertheless if they opt to do so.

Additionally, SCCL would consolidate their newspaper databases to a different vendor in this plan.

The Board of Trustees is expected to vote on the proposed FY26 budget in June.