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VLA Legislative Committee Chair Tom Shepley, Co-Chair Legislative Committee’s 2021 work is an extension of the 2020 session, which ended right as the pandemic took hold. In 2020, Legislative Committee and our Legislative Liaison, Phil Abraham, achieved the 2020 VLA Legislative Agenda of a $2M increase in state aid for public libraries, which would have come in the form of state aid increasing $1M each year of the biennial budget. However the General Assembly froze this appropriation due to budget uncertainties due to the pandemic. In the special session held in the fall of 2020, we successfully lobbied to retain the $1M increase in funding for FY2021. At the 2021 regular and special session, we successfully lobbied to retain the $1M increase in funding for FY2022. An additional $500,000 increase achieved at the 2020 Session remained in the base appropriation for both years, bringing the total increase realized over the course of the current biennium to $2.5 million.
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