HONESDALE, PA — A handsome Victorian on Main Street holds the keys to some very 21st-century skills.

“We’re trying very hard to help with digital literacy in this area, adult literacy, making people feel comfortable coming in and asking for help with their computers, with their programs, their smartphones,” said Tracy L. Schwarz, the director of the Wayne County Public Library and administrator of the Wayne Library Alliance System.

She pointed to the current tax season as just one example of why the community needs its library, which is partnering with the Workforce Alliance to help filers. “They won’t send us any tax forms other than your two basic forms, and we have people coming in who are being told they have to do this online. So they come to us. We’re printing out all the forms. We have to charge because paper isn’t free, and neither is ink.”

But, she said, “It breaks my heart when you have people coming in saying, ‘I don’t even know how to turn on the computer. How am I supposed to do my taxes or apply for unemployment or apply for Social Security?’”

The River Reporter talked with Schwarz about the library’s growing importance at a time when its funding model is unsustainable.

What is the library’s greatest need?

Consistent funding. There’s a misperception from having the word “county” in the title, that the library is county-funded and we are all county employees. That is absolutely not true. We are an independent registered 501(c)3 nonprofit. About 20 percent of the operational budget is state-funded. An additional 30 percent is from the goodwill of the Wayne County commissioners. That could go either way depending on who’s in charge. It’s not mandated like a millage tax.

But it’s still coming from taxpayers?

Yes. It’s an allocation from the county split among seven libraries [Bethany, Hamlin, Hawley, Newfoundland, Northern Wayne, Pleasant Mount and Honesdale]. That essentially brings most of us to about 50 percent. However, the price of everything is increasing. Then you’re left with the other 50 percent and doing fundraisers, doing campaign letters. You’re taking people who are supposed to be here doing a job and having them spend a lot of time making the money to keep the doors open.

Most of us have an ongoing book sale. We have the Family Fun Fair. It’s great, but it’s a lot of work and a lot of output of money, and sometimes the return is more than what we see later down the road.

Every nonprofit that I know is looking for volunteers. We see it with the fire companies—when you’re talking fire and ambulance and not having paid services, that’s a huge problem.

What is the yearly budget for the seven-member alliance?

The alliance is not a library per se, so we get an amount of money that is then divided up. It’s around $300,000. So with our library here, Wayne County Public Library, being the largest, my state aid is around $78,000 and my county aid is about $117,260.

You’re talking about having to provide e-resources and move books back and forth around the county. We have a driver. We don’t own a van. We’re basically working with a contract employee to take all of the books back and forth. People don’t quite grasp the amount of work that takes.

We’ve done resource sharing with all five of the counties in the northeast [Susquehanna, Wayne, Lackawanna, Wyoming and Pike] to share dollars and drivers and not have to spend as much on collection. We have e-resource sharing with the Northeast Digital Library, which is again the five counties.

There’s something like 450 independent libraries in the state, all funded differently. Some have a library tax. Some are like parts of their county or municipality. So they’re getting funding from different places. Lackawanna is similar to us in that they are what is called a federated system. They are an alliance with member libraries who all have their own independent boards and budgets, but they also have a library tax. We are federated and have this alliance with the seven libraries, but we don’t have a library tax.

So there’s no sustainable funding. Is a library tax on your wish list?

Yes. I just don’t know that in our current political situation it’s feasible because it’s a millage state. It puts a lot of pressure on large property owners who are already feeling the pinch of everything. And when we did go for a library tax years ago, it passed, and then it was immediately voted out. There were years of discord between the libraries and the community, and it was not a good situation.
We have a very good relationship with our county commissioners. We meet with them quite frequently and want to talk about moving forward to shore up the libraries. But I don’t know that that’s a feasible path right now.

You were surprised by the rumor that the library might close for lack of money. Was state aid late in coming?

Yes. There were portions of the budget that were not passed, and it was left until around December 15. It just pushed everything back. As a nonprofit, you’re supposed to spend all your money in a year. But it gets tricky towards the end, to hold over when you’re pushed back. It seems to be getting later and later with passing key budget situations, and it makes it very difficult on particularly small, rural libraries. And the last thing any of us want to do is have to get loans or lines of credit to be able to pay our people. Everyone in this area is looking to try to pay their staff a competitive wage, and that is very difficult to do when you don’t know where half your budget’s coming from. So then you lose good people.

How big a staff do you have?

Our paid staff is mostly part-timers, but we have about 11 people.

When somebody’s on vacation or sick, their job is done by volunteers?

Yes, very much so. We used to be close to about 70 or 80. Now we’re down to maybe 30 or 40. And we have a Friends group that’s incredibly helpful and can and do a lot of their own things, like a soup sale, to help keep money coming in.

So, the library’s not going to close?

There’s no worries that way. We are trying very hard to strategically plan for a future when we don’t have to do eight million fundraisers to get through a year. Yes, we are in need of money all the time, but we are not at a point where we are ready to close the doors because when we get to that point, I’ll be going up and down Main Street rallying people. We have some really wonderful donors and some really wonderful support in the community from the business community and from other nonprofits. I would never want to insinuate in any way that people don’t love the library. I just think in a lot of ways they’re not aware of how underfunded we are. I would rather spend my days doing things to help people as opposed to entering things in donor management and trying to figure out, yeah, some months I am going, how am I going to pay that light bill?

Do you work with the Wayne County Community Foundation?

Yes, very closely. The alliance has a technology fund through them. A legacy giving program in honor of Molly Rogers was started a few years back but then COVID hit and we didn’t put out much material about it. It’s called the Libraries of the Future Fund. It allows people to plan in their estate planning to give to the library to make sure that we’re always here.

You have an ongoing capital campaign to replace the roof?

The building is from 1868. We are constantly trying to upgrade things, make them more fuel-efficient, and just fix things that have been let go. We have an architect on the board who did a survey of the building to see in what order things needed to be repaired. We had a Keystone Grant years ago that fixed the heating and those types of things. But the major concern was the roof, that all of the roofing had to be replaced. Our front porch was replaced and evened out from a safety perspective.

Next up will be the handrail on the ramp, and then the exterior has a lot of loose masonry. It being a historic building, you want to take care of it.

It was originally built as a single-family home. The building was repurposed as an elderly care facility. In 1990 the library was located on Main Street down near Stephens Pharmacy, and they were technically gifted the building. They did a human chain moving books as part of the celebration. And it was a perfect building because the basement has a stone foundation and holds everything we have. It looks like a library.

Are there ways for people to get involved?

Yeah. I mean, everything from a chocolate bar to being a sponsor for the Family Fun Fair. If you have books that you are looking to donate, we try to accept as many as we can. We just don’t have a lot of space.
We’re very, very pleased that the community is as supportive of us as they can be. But, there’s only so many times you can ask for money, right?

Even spreading information of what we are offering through Facebook, Instagram, flyers, websites — I haven’t done TikTok yet. There’s so many different places to put information out, but I feel like nobody’s getting it anyway because they’re overloaded and they’re just shutting down. So, nine times out of 10, people will go, oh wait, I didn’t know you were doing this or I had no idea how you were funded.

When people get angry and they say, you know my county tax dollars pay, you’re a county employee and I’m like, no, I am definitely not. And it’s all about education and being able to have a conversation with people, and bringing it down from anger to what the actual story is.

We want to be here. We want to help people. We want to do what’s right.

For more information about the Wayne County Library, visit https://www.waynelibraries.org or call  570-253-1220.