Ten-Year Financial Transparency and Forecasting
Salt Lake City Public Library
Innovation Synopsis
What if asking your community for the largest tax increase in your library's history made them trust you more? The Salt Lake City Public Library replaced year-to-year budgeting with a ten-year financial forecast that showed elected officials and residents, in plain terms, exactly what library services cost, what buildings need, and what the community gets in return. That transparency won approval of a 5.3 million dollar property tax increase, the largest in the library's history, and something more surprising: two years after residents were first surveyed, and after the increase took effect, community support for additional library funding had risen from 73 percent to 87 percent in the fall of 2025. The same long-range financial case now anchors an upcoming bond proposal and capital campaign, giving the library a durable, sequenced funding strategy instead of a series of one-time asks.
Challenge/Opportunity
A 2018 comprehensive condition and needs assessment of all facilities, including the 240,000 sq. ft. Main Library and Chapman, a 1918 Carnegie branch, confirmed what staff suspected: the system faced deep deferred maintenance with no way to pay for it.
- Recent capital projects had run over budget, depleting the fund balance reserves that were the library's only capital funding source.
- Operating costs were rising faster than inflation: employee health benefits and digital materials far outpaced revenue growth.
- SLCPL's mission had expanded well beyond a traditional library's, including responses to homelessness and food insecurity, adding real costs that tax revenues alone could not cover.
- The library had no multi-year financial model, so decision makers saw each budget request in isolation, with no picture of the structural gap.
The opportunity: build the long-term financial case first, then ask, so every request arrives pre-justified.
Key Elements of Innovation
- 10-year financial forecasting: staff built inflation-adjusted projections of operating needs, capital needs and revenues, quantifying the structural gap rather than asserting it. Officials could see the problem themselves.
- Sequenced funding strategy: stabilize operations through the property tax increase first, then pursue a bond for capital reconstruction, then a capital campaign for philanthropy, each ask building on the credibility of the last.
- Partnership advocacy: the library worked with Salt Lake City and the SLC Community Reinvestment Agency to position its needs honestly within citywide priorities, rather than competing for attention.
- Community engagement as measurement: recurring surveys track willingness to fund the library, turning public trust into a metric leadership manages.
The innovation for the field: treating financial transparency itself as community engagement. The financial forecast serves not as a back-office tool, but as one of community trust-buildng.
Achieved Outcomes
- FY2025 approval of a $5.3M (20%) property tax increase, the largest in SLCPL history.
- Public trust grew after the ask: 73% of surveyed residents supported additional library funding in 2023; by fall of 2025, after the tax increase took effect, support had risen to 87%.
- Two consecutive years, the SLC Mayor selected library projects, over all other city departments, for congressional appropriations requests, a direct endorsement of the library's capital planning.
- The City Council approved multi-million dollar funding for design of full reconstruction and renovation of two branches, demonstrating confidence in the library's capital strategy.
- The forecasting model is now the foundation for an upcoming bond proposal and capital campaign, extending the strategy from operations into generational capital investment.
Success metrics going forward: survey trendlines, bond outcome, campaign totals, and elimination of the deferred maintenance backlog.
