AUGUSTA — The Maine Library Commission voted unanimously Monday to postpone its vote to adopt a new agreement that would force the state’s smallest libraries to hire directors and expand their hours if they want to continue to access the state’s inter-library loan service, including e-books, and internet service.

Commissioners also voted to seek a legal opinion on the document to avoid “punishing” rural libraries. They plan to take up the agreement again at their regular meeting in January.

The proposed agreement requires all library directors to be paid on a scale that meets state and federal law, even for small rural libraries that have relied on volunteer labor because they don’t have the finances to hire staff. 

There are 20 libraries now operating with unpaid directors and several more pay minimum stipends of $1 to $100 per year. 

The agreement also requires all libraries to be open at least 12 hours a week, which could create hardships for small libraries, some of which are now open as few as 3 hours each week.

The original deadline for libraries to sign the agreement was Jan. 1, with a three-year grace period to comply with the new requirements, but that date will be pushed off until after the commission votes on the agreement, now scheduled for Jan. 12.

Maine Library Commission chairman Bryce Cundick, who is the library director for the University of Maine at Farmington and represents Maine’s large university libraries on the commission, opened the meeting by acknowledging public interest in the agreement that developed over the weekend and the large number of people at the meeting who wanted to comment on its passage.

Before opening up for public comment, Cundick said he wanted people to understand that the last time the library agreement was updated was in 2012 but it has been around in some form since the 1970s.

He said the new agreement was drafted to mark the line “between what the Maine State Library can and cannot support” for member libraries as the state faces higher costs for van delivery used as part of the state’s inter-library loan service, among other costs to provide services to Maine’s 257 public libraries. 

Under the proposed Maine Regional Library System Public Library Agreement to Participate, libraries would be required to meet the Maine State Library’s definition of a “public library” in terms of paid staff, hours of operation, regular financial audits, and a host of other requirements. Those that do not meet the top tier of requirements — which includes many small libraries — would be reclassified as “limited-service libraries.”

A limited-service library would not be eligible to participate in the Maine Regional Library System’s reciprocal borrowing program or van delivery service for interlibrary loans. It would also lose access to e-books and e-audiobooks through a Maine Infonet Workload Library subscription, free and low-cost staff training, internet connection subsidies, technical support and Ancestry Library Edition services offered through the Digital Maine Library.

Last week, after some small libraries heard about the proposed agreement, a number of them pushed back, saying they cannot afford the new requirements on tight budgets and did not want to be forced to choose between paying salaries and expanding services or potentially shutting down.

One of those people was Carol Wolf, vice president of the Pembroke Library Association and associate professor emerita of English and academic services at UMaine Machias.

She attended Monday’s Zoom meeting and was the first to offer public comment.

“Although these requirements may have been on the books for many years, they’ve never been enforced. Why are they being enforced now?” she asked.

At the start of the meeting Cundick made it clear that commissioners would not answer questions raised during the comment period, so her question was not answered.

The commission next heard from Robin Hadlock Seeley, who is a Pembroke resident and has been a donor and patron of the Pembroke Memorial Library for the past 40 years.

“This agreement that you are voting on today will have extreme impacts on small libraries,” she said. “This commission does not seem to have done any impact study of this agreement. I am asking you to either vote ‘no’ or postpone the vote on the agreement until the next meeting until you can fully understand the impacts on these communities.”

She acknowledged that the Maine State Library is willing to give libraries three years to conform so there is some time to plan, but questioned why there wasn’t financial support offered to meet the standards to pay directors and conduct annual audits.

“There is no spare cash in Washington County at this moment, I assure you,” Seeley said, and “the very fact that you would consider voting on this new agreement without first directly notifying the libraries or doing an impact study is alarming to me.”

She pointed out that the Pembroke library is more than a lending library: “Residents who cannot afford an internet connection or a computer depend on our three aging desktop computers. People seek jobs there.”

Seeley, like many others, pointed out that libraries can often be more important in smaller communities than in large communities, and she said “this agreement will not serve struggling Maine communities.”

Barbara Baig, a teacher and professional writer living in Washington County, echoed the need for access to internet services in small towns and said she’d “never heard of such a short-sighted and mean-spirited public policy” and admonished the commission for “the lack of understanding that rural areas are not cities and in setting public policy should not be treated like cities.”

She made no apology for her tone of voice, and said, “You, on the commission, with all due respect, you have not done your homework here. I suggest you put it off for six months or perhaps a year. I suggest you visit small libraries and see how they work” and “then perhaps you can come up with a policy that reflects the reality” for rural libraries instead of setting policy “from the view out of a window in Augusta.”

Other residents of Pembroke County spoke, including Stephen Sanfilippo, local historian and retired professor of maritime history, who said libraries serve as one the most important centers of life in small towns, providing many educational and cultural opportunities for residents.

“In the ever-increasing rural divide it is essential that the people, especially children, have access to library services lest they fall behind.” He encouraged the commission to find a way to expand services in rural libraries, not restrict them.

Jennifer Maffett, who owns Eastport Gallery, is also a Pembroke patron who said she would hate to see public internet access “blown apart. The system for our library is not broken so I would be curious to find out what broken thing this proposal is trying to solve because if you vote ‘yes,’ it will surely break our library.” 

Bo Yerxa of Waldoboro, an educator and former community college dean, said Maine has an obligation to its small towns and voiced frustration that he’d only learned of the proposed agreement over the weekend through Monitor Local reporting. 

“I don’t think there’s been enough public input. I don’t think this (meeting) is adequate. I really question that there’s been enough public awareness of this and this discussion,” he said, begging commissioners not to vote on the proposal. “Find a way to put this out to the public, particularly to the underserved rural areas. I just don’t think there’s been enough process on this,” Yerxa said.

In light of how many people attended the meeting to comment and the large number of emails the commission has received on the topic over the past several days, Cundick asked if the commission would entertain immediate discussion on that feedback rather than consider the agreement as scheduled toward the end of the agenda.

The commission agreed and vice chairwoman Heidi Grimm, the library director in Yarmouth, immediately made a motion to postpone a vote on the proposed agreement until the commission’s January meeting. Maine State Library trustee Jane Padham Ouderkirk quickly seconded that.

Before the vote was held, though, commissioner Andrew Wallace, who also serves as a trustee for the Portland Public Library, said he was struck, after “hearing from so many constituents in email and at the meeting today that maybe they didn’t feel that there was enough (information) shared with them.”

He proposed that, rather than simply delay the vote, the Maine Library Commission “reach out to all the impacted libraries in the state” to discuss the agreement’s requirements.

“Further,” he said, “I’d be interested in hearing whoever represents us for legal counsel what their interpretation of the law is because I don’t think anyone wants to punish rural libraries, but I think there’s a complication between what the benchmarks are” and what libraries are required to do.

Maine State Librarian Lori Stockman reminded commissioners that the benchmarks of excellence for libraries had already been approved at the commission’s June meeting, and were intended to serve as inspirational guidelines not hard requirements, so the only document that remains before the commission is the agreement for libraries to meet certain standards in order to continue to participate in all state services.

This story was originally published by The Maine Monitor, a nonprofit civic news organization. To get regular coverage from The Monitor, sign up for a free Monitor newsletter here.