GRAND RAPIDS — An anonymous donor has stepped forward to offer $30,000 in matching funds to the Grand Rapids Area Library to help expand its hours next year.
To receive the grant, the library needs to raise its own $30,000 by Sept. 1.
The grant, announced Wednesday, June 24, at a community meeting at the library, is part of the Supporting our Grand Rapids Area Library Fund. Since its start last fall, the fund has raised $90,000 to support staff pay in 2027.
“We’re just blown away by the monetary support and just the support emotionally,” Dettmer said. “People have felt staff’s pain. We want to do what we can, and it’s been tough.”
The fund was created in response to a $260,000 decrease in funding from the city that resulted in staff and hour cuts. In 2025, the city accounted for 84% of the library's budget, despite city residents only making about a third of checkouts.
City Councilor Molly MacGregor said the hope was for the county to pick up more of the funding. She said they specifically asked for around $300,000.
Itasca county levies $50,000 more for libraries than the minimum required by state law. After some back and forth, the county rerouted the extra $50,000, which previously went to the overall Arrowhead Library System, directly to the Grand Rapids library. It raised the county's 2026 contributions to $178,000. The city still contributes 72% of the overall budget.
The library is currently open for seven hours a day, Monday through Wednesday.
“Hopefully [the fund] is going to help us open four or five days during the week and Saturdays,” said Mindy Nuhring, Grand Rapids Area Community Foundation executive director.
The official operating hours will be announced at the end of the year, after the Grand Rapids City Council approves its 2027 budget.
At the meeting, Nuhring also announced that the Center for Rural Policy and Development has taken an interest in the issue. The center is a non-partisan, nonprofit policy research organization dedicated to providing policy makers with unbiased information from rural perspectives.
The center would research Minnesota's overall public library funding system, as well as different ways rural libraries could be funded.
In Minnesota, state and federal public library funds are distributed directly to the 12 regional public library systems. The formula used to split up state library aid is based on four factors: population, geographic size, tax capacity and a base amount.
The goal of the four factors is to make the funding split equitable between metropolitan systems and rural systems.
State and federal funding makes up around 30% of library funding, with the other 70% coming from local city and county taxes. In Minnesota, cities and counties are required to pay a certain amount of money to libraries, called the maintenance of effort. The maintenance of effort rate was frozen in 2011 and hasn't changed since.
If pursued, the center's research would be shown to the state Legislature in January.
“That’s a big deal, because that is a larger organization than us trying to push that to the legislators,” Nuhring said. “It really is a matter of making the current legislators know that this is an issue.”
