> The proposal, approved close to midnight by the House Budget Committee, would cut the entire $4.5 million in state aid that libraries were slated to get next year. The proposed library cut, along with other changes to the state’s roughly $50 billion budget, will now head to the full Missouri House. What does this mean for libraries? $4.5 million can't have been enough to fund a statewide library network so presumab…
You can see where aid goes here: https://www.sos.mo.gov/library/development/stateaid/default
And then you can look up or estimate the total spend for each of those community's libraries.
Likely this means approximately nothing for most suburban, urban, and exurban/college town/resort town/etc. library systems. Those communities can easily cover the difference, and their libraries have large enough budgets that a 20K hit is barely felt. Might lose some overtime or a very part-time librarian, or reduce some fringe services, or most likely just re-appropriate a rounding error's worth of local funds to make up the difference.
Very well might mean a death sentence or significant service degradation for many of the state's rural libraries.