Leslie Pallotta knows all too well about the financial issues public libraries are facing as municipal budgets across the country tighten.

As the director of the Cranberry Public Library, Pallotta spends plenty of time figuring out how best to acquire additional funding to ensure the library flourishes.

One of those funding avenues involved attending a Seven Fields council meeting Monday and formally asking the borough to increase its per capita funding, in keeping up with inflation, to support the library’s needs.

“Our ultimate goal is to eventually get Seven Fields to match the Cranberry per capita contribution,” said Pallotta. “But rather than asking them to do that in one giant leap, we decided to ask them to please consider doing it in steps over several years. That’s the approach we took this year.”

In terms of circulation rate, Cranberry Public Library is the largest of seven public libraries within the Butler County Federated Library System. Cranberry Township and Seven Fields are the only two municipalities contributing financially to that library.

With its budget already finalized for 2025, Cranberry Township will pay $14.33 per capita for the year. Seven Fields, which boasts just a fraction of Cranberry Township’s population, has paid a per capita rate of $5 since 2012.

Pallotta and the library’s Board of Trustees president Tom Parkinson have asked Seven Fields to raise its per capita contribution to $6.85, which would align with inflation over the past 12 years.

Last year, Pallotta and Parkinson asked Seven Fields to match Cranberry’s contribution per person, but that proposal ultimately was rejected.

“We’d just like to see Seven Fields treat it as its own,” Parkinson said. “Right now the disparity is wide, so we’d like Seven Fields to take steps to close that gap. The key to operating a public library relies on public support. We’re hopeful they’ll be able to amp up what they’re doing. The biggest thing we want the residents of Seven Fields to know is that Cranberry Library is also their library and that everyone can see the value of investing in it.”

According to Pallotta, there are four main streams of support for every library in the state: state funding, local municipal funding, county funding and in-house funding such as fines, fundraising and used-book sales.

After sending circulation rates of residents to the supervisors of Seven Fields, Pallotta’s hope is that some sort of action can be taken in the future.

“There’s always hope,” she said. “If we don’t ask, the answer’s always going to be no. What do we have to lose, really?”