Our New Library: Money Very Well Spent

The library gives our community more than $10.3 million in services each year.

Learn more below

Homeowner Annual Calculator

Two-thirty two is the cost to you $ per million in assessed home value

Look up your address to view your annual tax for keeping our library building standing.

This is a tiny tiny fraction of what having a local public library is worth each year.

Our current library building on a sunny day, looking better on the outside than the inside.

Community Annual Value

The library gives our community more than $10.3 million in services each year.

This is a data-driven, bottom up, estimate built upon actual measured usage of our Belmont Public Library. I combined a year’s worth of Board of Trustees meeting materials and annual reports into the library usage calculator. I’ve been data-driven, heartless, rational, and utilitarian: this estimate adds up only the easy-to-measure, tangible economic value. You do not need to love libraries to see:

A YES vote for our library rewards taxpayers within just a few years.

If you value libraries only for their economic cost/benefit, I have nerdy details of the raw data and valuation methodology. Put another way:

I’m understating how valuable the library is to our community.

Let’s talk about the less-tangible stuff. The above analysis and conclusion omitted a large number of services that are local and free for everyone. These benefits were excluded merely because they were harder to quantify or I lacked data. I still ended up finding a huge economic benefit to our community.

Imagine our library—abandoned—and the hole it would leave in our community.

It is an anchor location drawing people downtown to small local businesses.

It gives us: Access to curated sources of knowledge. A library of things. Access to research databases. Common indoor and outdoor space. A cooling center.

It provides: A quiet place to work, study or learn. Being part of the entrepreneurial community that works from the library. Community gatherings.

It is: A source of inspiration. Finding and taking out your first book. Sitting in a nook reading with your grandchild. A safe space. Voting. And more

Imagine being that town which opted to not contribute to the broader Boston metro area. Are we that town?

I fully agree with Belmont resident Mary Lewis. Now that we know our family’s costs and the value of the benefits to Belmont, I hope you will join our community in voting Yes on #5 on November 8th.

Nerdy Details

This is a data-driven, bottom up, estimate built upon actual measured usage of our Belmont Public Library. I combined a year’s worth of Board of Trustees meeting materials and annual reports into the library usage calculator. We get way more than we pay for.

Our library is money very very very well spent.

Total library usage is growing—in fact our library is the 10th busiest in the state despite the building leaking, falling apart and being inaccessible. The past two non-covid years saw the highest usage in history

Fiscal Year (July-June)Total Check Outs & Downloads
2022625,433
2019599,254
Our community is relying on the library more than ever.

If we were to collectively buy or rent just the circulation services, it would cost about $9 million dollars a year. Because it is our public library, and our community is part of the Minuteman Library Network, you have access to all these tangible economic benefits for pennies on the dollar.

Program offerings increased and were the highest ever in 2021-2022, especially for young adults looking to reconnect post-pandemic. In fiscal year 2022 there were more than 12,000 program attendees, a huge rebound from covid years. The library averages hundreds of daily in-person visitors and hosts more than 2 programs / day.

Fiscal Year (July-June)Programs Offered
2022838
2019772
Our library is a community center for education and social well-being.

Our community loves and uses our library—a lot. I fed the annual usage into the library value calculator and found the library is a home-run value every year, and especially the last two non-covid years

Fiscal Year (July-June)Economic Value
2022$10.3 million
2021 [covid]$6.8 million
2020 [covid]$8.5 million
2019$9.8 million
The services at our local public library provided $10 million in benefits to our community from July 2021 through June 2022.

See the full breakdown by category.

Including all salaries and systems, the library’s annual operating budget is about $2.2 million / year [pdf, pg 62]. Even with a debt exclusion, our library is a multi-million dollar a year economic benefit to our community at a huge discount. Again, I’m being overly harsh by assuming no increase in usage or services. For comparison, once we rebuilt the Underwood Pool and it was a pleasant place to be, community usage and quality of service increased dramatically.

Our library is more than books!