By Adam Swift
The Revere Public Library now has an official mechanism to receive donations to help support its operations, programming, and maintenance.
Monday night, the city council approved establishing a gift account for the Revere Public Library.
“Recently, the Library was the grateful recipient of a significant donation of over $18,000 from the Revere Beautification Committee upon the dissolution of their organization,” stated Library Director Diana Luongo in a letter to the council. “In addition to the generous gift, the Library routinely receives monetary donations throughout the year from individuals and community groups who wish to support library programs, collections, and services.”
With the lack of a designated account to deposit the funds, Luongo said the library was limited in its ability to properly hold, track, and utilize donations for their intended purposes.
“Establishing a dedicated donation account would allow the Library to responsibly manage these funds and ensure they are used to directly benefit library services, programs, and the Revere community as intended by our donors,” Luongo stated.
Several councillors asked who would have oversight over the use of the gift donation funds.
“We follow the laws to make sure nothing is excessive, illegal, or fraudulent, but the gift account does not have to come before the council for appropriations from it,” said city finance director Richard Viscay. “It is essentially like a revolving fund. We establish the gift account and my job is the audit to make sure that the funds spent out of that account are indeed for the betterment of the library.”
The use of the gift account would be at the discretion of the library director and the board of library trustees, Viscay said.
Councillor-at-Large Robert Haas, III asked if there was a need to establish gift accounts for other departments in the city.
“We do have some set up, and I believe we have one for elder services and we have a donation account for fire,” said Viscay. “As the need comes up to create a gift account, we can certainly do so. But I don’t know how many departments actually get gifts; I can probably do a little investigating to see who does and does not.”
