Aug 6, 2025 By Brad Hundt 3 min read

Tardy state budgets in Pennsylvania are hardly out of the ordinary – an impasse between Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf and the Republican-controlled General Assembly dragged on for nine months during the first year of Wolf’s tenure a decade ago.

Now that a month has passed since a final 2025-26 budget was supposed to be delivered and signed, officials in communities across the commonwealth have started to get anxious about payments they would typically get from Harrisburg to help cover services ranging from drug and alcohol treatment to ambulances.

One institution that could be feeling an immediate impact is libraries.

Libraries across the state could be missing out on $14 million in payments that were set to arrive in August, and the impact of its late arrival would be felt specifically by the 29 district library centers in Pennsylvania.

Most libraries in Pennsylvania get state payments in January, according to Amy Anderson, the CEO of the Allegheny County Library Association, but libraries that are district centers get those payments in August, “so any delay can be a major issue for them and can lead to a loss of services.”

She added, “The level of service disruption will be varied across the commonwealth, but it is never good to have a significant delay in funding.”

The board of Citizens Library has taken out a $100,000 line of credit to tide the district center over until it gets the $370,000 it is supposed to get as a district center comes through. The district center is the hub of the WAGGIN network, a consortium of 20 libraries in Washington, Greene and Fayette counties that share services and handle such things as interlibrary loans, electronic resources and the development of collections. Without the line of credit, the absence of state money would “absolutely have a direct impact on those (district services),” according to Diane Ambrose, the executive director of Citizens Library.

Taking out the line of credit “is not something we like to do,” since interest payments come with it, Ambrose noted, but is necessary since an imminent resolution to the budget impasse doesn’t seem to be in the cards.

“We don’t want to cut services,” she said.

Christy Fusco, director of the Uniontown Public Library, said that library officials in Pennsylvania are not only biting their nails about the budget wrangling in the state capitol, but are also bracing for federal cuts that are set to go into effect in 2026.

“The longer this drags on, it just makes you more nervous,” Fusco said. “It is a very worrisome time.”