The Baldwin City Council has approved a plan to provide extra property tax support for the city library.

The actions the City Council approved at its March 15 meeting rescind the original charter ordinance passed in 1997, which gave the Baldwin City Library Board up to 4 mills of annual property tax authority. The council then approved a new charter ordinance giving the library up to 5 mills of annual taxing authority. However, the added 1 mill increase will have to be phased in over five years because the new charter ordinance limits the library’s annual mill levy increases to 0.20 mills.

Baldwin City Mayor Casey Simoneau said limiting the library to a 0.20 annual mill levy increase would allow the city to provide additional funding to the library without increasing the property tax burden on Baldwin City residents and businesses. The plan is to decrease the city’s annual budget the next five years to compensate for the library’s additional taxing authority.

“We’ll have to reduce the city budget by about $8,000 a year,” Simoneau said. “I think that’s very doable. My goal is not to increase the mill levy.”

The city’s mill rate has remained steady at 44.75 mills since 2016, Simoneau said. At the city’s current overall valuation, 1 mill of property taxes equals about $40,000.

Wendy Conover, Baldwin City Library director, brought the request to increase the library’s mill levy to the City Council at its March 1 meeting. She was suggesting the mill levy increase be phased in so that it could provide an additional $10,000 annually.

Conover told the City Council the additional revenue would help provide wage increases to library staff, increase starting pay from the current $10 an hour, provide health insurance for full-time employees — a benefit they currently do not have — and add an assistant director position.

The tax increase would not fund all of those goals, Conover said. The library would supplement the additional property taxes with revenue from the Douglas County Community Foundation.