1. United States
2. Ohio
3. Letter

I am writing as a constituent in Bowling Green, Ohio, to ask you to restore the PLF and set it at 1.75%. My family of four has been using our fantastic public library resources in Ohio since we moved back here in 2007, and I used it extensively as a child growing up in Bowling Green. Our Wood County District Public Library has provided a welcoming place for recreation and research and studying for school projects. We regularly left for home with a stack of children’s books from the fantastic children’s place when my kids were little. Now that they are pre-teens and teens, we use the Libby app to read ebooks from the local and state library collections every day. I check out books from Libby multiple times a week. It is so important to encourage this love of reading and learning, and the access that our public library provides to books and resources for school work, and reading materials for pleasure reading, has made a huge difference in the lives of everyone in our family. My kids love reading and learning because they have had access to a wide variety of reading materials at no cost to our family for their entire lives. No family can afford to provide on their own the wealth of resources that the library provides for our whole community, and cutting funding will only hurt our Wood County (and Ohio) citizens. Additionally, we have attended community theater and arts programs, studied in the comfortable space, found books for school research projects, read magazines, and played in the library. It is a community hub that deserves more money from the budget than they already receive, and the idea of lowering that funding is a terrible mistake for an important and cherished community resource. A strong library makes for a more attractive and welcoming community, and state, and we should do everything we can to protect these valuable community resources. As a 10+ year member of the BG chapter of the longest-running Shakespeare Round Table in the country, which helped create the WCDPL, we use the library twice a month to host our meetings. It is collaborations like these that make our community vibrant and unique. Please be an advocate for the kinds of places that make Ohio a good place to live--restore the PLF, and set it at 1.75% (or higher!), and please serve your constituents by advocating for the things that make this a great place to live, instead of cutting funding to our valuable resources. Thank you.