Disappointed in mayor

Dear Editor,

It was very sad to see Hudson Mayor Dean Knudson manipulate library statistics to try and convince us that all is well with the library. It’s even sadder that he did this under the guise of trying to correct misinformation, while in fact what he has done is much worse than anything in the latest report, which doesn’t paint a very positive picture of our library. I’ve written a long note to the members of the Library Board detailing the inaccuracies in Dean’s analysis, but in this space I’ll just mention a single issue. The mayor claims that if you compare library income of his selected set of peer libraries, Hudson is at or above average. How convenient to use the “income” figure rather than “expenditures”. For most every library in the state these match up quite closely, but for Hudson the yearly “income” figure is inflated by $350,000 because the state insists that our accumulated fund balance be listed as “income” each and every year. This fund is partly set aside for future library expansion, and partly used by the Library Board to handle yearly cash flow.

Dean should go back and recalculate his figures using the $626,000 library expenditures for Hudson, not the inflated $948,000 “income” number. Then we’ll see the familiar story that our library is indeed underfunded, at or near the bottom of any peer group of libraries that is selected.

Tags: hudson library, opinion, letters