During the FY2014 budget development deliberations this spring, the Town Council expressed interest to examine the current memorandum of understanding (MOU) the Town has with Falmouth Memorial Library (FML). There was particular interest in how information about FML finances is communicated with the Town Council. This interest coupled with FML's efforts toward expansion, led to the Council to ask Councilors Farber and Mahoney to pursue ways to improve the Town-FML relationship and work with the FML Board on expansion-related issues which impact the Town. These Councilors and the Town Manager met with the Library Expansion Team (LET) of the FML Board on a number of occasions and surveyed Scarborough
and Kennebunk town managers about their towns' relationships with their libraries (from a town manager perspective). (The reason these two were selected is because the relationships between town and library are known to be similar to Falmouth's arrangement.) The responses led the councilors and town manager to review Scarborough's MOU in more detail.
Councilors Farber and Mahoney met in the late summer and drafted a list of desired changes to the Town/FML MOU (a number of which came from the Scarborough example). Councilor Farber then met with the FML Board's designees, Mark Porada and Alison Bishop, to discuss these proposals. There was a consensus reached at that meeting to work toward completing an MOU that addresses the overall relationship between the Town and Library. There was additional consensus to further amend the MOU at a later date to address any proposed expansion and how that would impact the relationship.
As a byproduct of that meeting, the enclosed draft 2013 MOU was prepared. The proposed draft identifies a few suggested changes but none are deemed substantially different from what is currently in practice.
Rather than move forward with additional discussions with the FML Board or with the town attorney's review, the Council is asked to offer input on the direction of discussions with the FML Board going forward. |
