Think of this.

If someone asked you to list the most significant inventions in humanity’s history, what would you include?

Wouldn’t you include the printing press?

To be sure, humanity could — before the printing press — transmit knowledge, wisdom, and culture from one generation to the next.

Yet the printing press–invented by Johannes Gutenberg in Germany around 1440 — broadened the transmission.

Eventually, books became so prevalent that they needed repositories, so libraries — and eventually public libraries–were born.

Parents and guardians who haven’t secured a library card for school-aged children should do so today. It will open the world to them, and not just through books.

Crucial though books are, public libraries have much more than books. Public libraries varyingly have newspapers, periodicals, audiobooks, videos, movies, computers, classes, programs, exhibits, and more.

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In these parts, public libraries comprise the Chautauqua-Cattaraugus Library System, or CCLS.

CCLS’s website lists 38 public libraries from Silver Creek to Portville, and from Clymer-French Creek to Delevan-Yorkshire.

To sustain themselves, public libraries can receive money from many sources, including charities, private donations, and government. Taken together, our public libraries do all of those things.

New York law provides other ways.

Here is one.

Each local public library may put a proposition before voters for a specific annual amount of money. To increase the amount, a local public library must put another proposition before voters in another year. The law doesn’t permit, for example, annually indexing the amount to inflation.

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A public library may put such a proposition before the voters of the school district, or the municipality, where the public library is, said CCLS executive director Jan Dekoff.

If voters say “yes,” the library-tax levy is apportioned among real-property owners in the school district, or in the municipality. Each real-property owner’s tax depends on the real property’s non-exempt assessed value. It thereby works like other real-property taxes.

The school district, or the municipality, then collects the library tax and forwards library-tax money to the public library. To put it simplistically, the school district, or the municipality, becomes merely a pipeline for the money. Public libraries receive library-tax money from real-property owners.

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Many local communities have admirably decided to have public libraries. They, like other community institutions, can be community anchors.

Once local communities have decided to have public libraries, they need our sustained support. Does that mean a blank check? No, and no local public library seeks one.

What local public libraries need is a reliable annual-revenue source to sustain them.

Despite increased costs, some local public libraries have gone years without increasing levies. In the future, they’d do well to consider asking voters for small increases frequently, perhaps annually, rather than big increases infrequently.

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If you have a concern with your school district, or your municipality, that isn’t a concern with the local public library. Voting “no” on a library proposition won’t address the concern.

And no, for obvious security and law-related reasons–born of the need to protect the public from pupils and vice versa–the public may not use school libraries instead of public libraries, at least not when pupils are in school buildings. Most school libraries aren’t even open at other times.

Nor does it make sense to oppose, as some have, a library proposition, because their own town lacks a public library in the school district where a vote is held. Whether to have any additional public library is a separate question from whether to provide a reliable annual-revenue source to public libraries that we have already decided to have.

In considering a library proposition, voters would do well to consider carefully both the need for a reliable annual-revenue source and the amount a library requests.

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Are taxes too high in New York? Yes. As you, faithful reader of this column, understand: High taxes are among the reasons that despite tremendous efforts of many people, no one born since 1960 has any recollection of sustained local economic prosperity. That means we have senior citizens with no recollection of sustained local economic prosperity.

As you have read under this columnist’s byline for decades, the solution to that dilemma is to straighten out Albany.

The solution isn’t to reject providing a reliable annual-revenue source to libraries that communities have decided to have.

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When he was in elementary school, Dr. Randy Elf’s Mom took him to a local public library to get a library card.

COPYRIGHT (c) 2025 BY RANDY ELF