Brownsville library closed indefinitely
The Brownsville Free Public Library announced last week it was closing indefinitely as a consultant works with the library board to deal with financial and staffing issues.
Diane Ambrose, district administrator for libraries in Fayette, Greene and Washington counties, said the consultant’s understanding is that the library is in “dire financial condition.”
Board member Jim Pflugh said Tuesday he didn’t have a concrete answer about the library’s financial condition beyond saying the facility relies on state and local funding, donations from the community and grants. He said the facility has “always operated within our means.”
“We’re often going in multiple directions at the same time trying to get our funding, so sometimes just coordinating those efforts alone is a task in and of itself,” Pflugh said.
The library’s financial status had not been documented in recent reports.
The IRS revoked the library’s tax-exempt status after it failed to file several tax forms for three years, according to the organization’s page on Guidestar, a directory of nonprofits. The most recent tax forms available were from 2020, when the organization reported $444,906 in revenue, including $268,881 in government grants, versus $89,072 in expenses.
The library did not have financial or circulation data included in the state’s 2024 library report, the most recent to be released. It listed 1.53 full-time equivalent staff members, including a full-time librarian.
In the 2023 report, the library listed $24,668 in local revenue, $14,180 coming from local government and $10,508 from other sources. That year, it listed $41,294 in expenses, split between $25,311 for staff, $6,601 for collection expenditures and $9,382 in other operating expenditures.
“We are in regular contact with the library, and we certainly hope that the issues will be worked out and we’ll be able to have our library reopen,” Ambrose said. “Sometimes that takes a long time, a long process.”
Pflugh said Tuesday the decision to close also resulted from the board becoming aware of operational issues at the library while looking at potential changes, including restructuring staff operations.
“As we looked at those, we decided we needed to take some time and space, make sure we really understood things and would be able to correct things and move forward,” he said.
Pflugh hopes to be able to open the library well in advance of the library’s centennial in 2027. Ideally, he said, within a month they will be able to open for at least a couple of days a week so patrons can check out and return items.
The library is also working to be able to resume its partnership with an organization that does fingerprints for security clearances and background checks, Pflugh said.
In the meantime, patrons who have requested interlibrary loans will be able to pick them up at the Uniontown library, Pflugh said.
He apologized to patrons for the abrupt closure and the issues it caused for residents.
“We certainly felt that for the long-term health of the library, we needed to make sure that we took that time, to make sure we understood what the issues were, come up with strategies to address and correct everything and then move forward, rather than trying to do that while we’re trying to do all the operational things,” he said.