PRESENT: Deborah Abraham, John Beauregard, Tom Cesarz, Patrick J. Cloherty Jr., Mike Franceschi, Camilla Glynn, Dee Hanley, Marjorie Hill-Devine, Douglas Rendell, Bonnie Strong and Executive Director Ron Gagnon.

The Executive Council met for the purpose of reviewing and discussing Ron’s proposed FY 2000 budget. The meeting was called to order at 2:05 pm.

Ron presented his draft for the proposed budget for FY 2000. 4.2% is the figure for the CPI plus 2%; the proposed budget is a 4.1% increase. Comments included:

• Projected a doubling of the rent costs, with the common area charge staying the same and the rate portion separate. It is low now--$6 per square foot with us paying for everything else on our own. Pat Cloherty is assisting with the rent issue.
  
• Included the E-rate discount as it still seems to be working its way through. He noted that the MBLC telecomm reimbursement actually impacts us more—we received twice as much money last year from the MBLC as we did the year before.
  
• The PC Support program is not included in the budget nor is the ILL Service Center. Brief discussion on the effectiveness of the system and a new report which will help track old requests.
  
• Training for NOBLE staff is important as networking is changing.

John asked about the possibility of attracting new members by allowing them to pay only a portion of the database costs initially. Ron explained that most potential members would already be automated as stand alone sites and would be looking to cut over to NOBLE, so the considerations are different.

Dee had a question regarding basing charges on ports versus number of users. Ron indicated that this could change with a new vendor and with any new client-server system and would need to be reviewed later. III, for example, was going to charge for staff workstations and not for the Web catalog.

Pat brought up the cost distribution per port, noting that a few years ago, we started to move shared costs into this category. The goal was to increase costs for libraries with more ports and decrease costs for libraries with few ports; the category has not had anything new added to it last year. He noted that the MBLC reimburses here, and that this area is up 6% while the rest of the budget is up 3%. John suggested that perhaps we should approach it differently and ask what demands a smaller library makes versus a larger library. It was suggested that another draft could be prepared by the next budget discussion seeing what would happen if we shifted costs to reflect that.

The meeting was adjourned at 4:10 pm.

Respectfully Submitted,

Bonnie J. Strong

Secretary