J. Robert Jamerson Memorial Library
General Library
4.10 Budget Proposal
Required Documents
At the start of the calendar year, the County of Appomattox issues the following documents to the departments:
- Five-year expenditure summary
- Request for the next Fiscal Year’s annual budget.
At around September the Library of Virginia posts the following document to the Extranet:
- Upcoming Fiscal Year State Aid Estimate
The Proposal
At the start of each calendar year, it is the responsibility of the Library Director to create a line-item budget proposal. The budget proposal must be officially approved by the Library Board before being delivered to the County Administrator. At minimum, the budget calculation shall take into account:
- The five-year expenditure summary
- Any predicted increases or decreaases in expenditure
- Any upcoming increases or decreases in state aid
The exact calculation should be, roughly:
average expenditure + (predicted expenditure increase - predicted expenditure decrease) + (upcoming year’s state aid - outgoing year’s state aid) = upcoming year’s budget
At minimum, the budget proposal shall include:
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Coverletter summarizing the calculation at which the bottom line was reached, highlighting the importance of state aid requirements where applicable.
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A copy of Appomattox County’s State Aid Estimate (just one page is fine)
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The five-year expenditure summary with the upcoming year’s line-item figures entered in the appropriate column
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Any documentation justifying any increase or decraese in total budgeted amount over-and-above that which occurs due to an increase or decrease in state aid
State Aid Requirements
In order to recieve these vitally important state aid grants the Library must satisfy all State Aid Requirements.
Requirement one is fairly straight-forward and ensures that each Library systems receives only one grant.
Requirement two is the primary requirement for documentation. Each year the Director is responsible for submitting up-to-date documentation. These are to be submitted according to the Documentation Schedule
Requirement three has to do with the budget. Particular attention must be paid to Requirement 3 to ensure that the appropriate starting budget is tallied. The Director must ensure to account for any increase or decrease in State Aid. For example, when applying for “level-funding”, the Library must actually ask for more if their state aid goes up, or ask for less if the state aid goes down, in order to comply with state aid requirements.
The rest of the requirements are a variety of programming, scheduling, procedural, and coverage criteria.
Failure to comply with any one of the requirements could easily result in the Library losing State Aid. Libraries may submit a waiver to the Library of Virginia’s Library Development and Networking Division along with evidence of effort/progress toward meeting the requirement. The State Library Board may elect to approve or deny such a waiver based on said evidence, and enact remediation or penalty.
- Created April 2018. Updated May 2018.*