1.1 million pieces a year: a library federation's stake in postal rates

The Federation of Community Libraries serves 1,900 small and rural public libraries out of a 16-person staff in Baltimore. Its single largest recurring expense, after payroll, is postage. Executive Director Lucinda Farrow-Mbatha's federation mails 1.1 million pieces a year: newsletters, grant notices, and shared-catalog updates, sent to member libraries that often have no other reliable way to reach a federation with no local office near them.

Most of the federation's members are libraries serving towns too small to support their own communications budget. Farrow-Mbatha's team mails on their behalf: overdue-notice templates, state grant deadlines, shared summer-reading program materials. None of it moves as fast electronically, she said, because many of the smallest libraries still serve patrons without reliable broadband.

"A 40% postage increase doesn't come out of some marketing line item for us," Farrow-Mbatha said. "It comes out of the same budget that pays for the grant notices that tell a two-person library in rural Maryland that money is available to fix their roof."

Nonprofit Postal Rate Reform is NANA's advocacy push for a permanent, statutory nonprofit mail rate class, rather than one set administratively and subject to change. Farrow-Mbatha will testify alongside NANA's Director of Public Policy Simone Radcliffe before the Postal Regulatory Commission on August 27.

• 1,900 member libraries served

• 1.1 million pieces of mail sent per year

• 16-person federation staff, headquartered in Baltimore

• No dedicated communications budget at most member libraries

Farrow-Mbatha said she agreed to testify because her federation's math is easy for a regulator to follow: a library federation this size runs almost entirely on mail, not because it hasn't modernized, but because the libraries it serves haven't been given the infrastructure to modernize with it.

"I'm not asking the commission to subsidize us forever," she said. "I'm asking them to set a rate class we can actually plan a budget around, instead of guessing every year."

Farrow-Mbatha has run the federation for over a decade, and said the mail volume has stayed roughly flat even as digital tools have improved, because the federation's members are precisely the libraries digital tools reach least well. A shared-catalog update that a larger library system pushes out over an app has to go out as a printed insert to member libraries whose patrons check the catalog on a shared public terminal, if they check it online at all.

That makes postage a fixed cost the federation cannot engineer its way around, unlike overhead it can trim from its own 16-person staff. Farrow-Mbatha said the federation has already cut every discretionary line it can: no branch offices, minimal travel, and a print run sized as tightly as its member count allows. What's left, she said, is the actual cost of reaching 1,900 libraries that depend on the mail to hear from her at all.

Radcliffe said Farrow-Mbatha's testimony matters to the commission because it makes the cost concrete for a member-based association, rather than an abstract postal-policy argument. "Lucinda isn't testifying about postal economics in the abstract," Radcliffe said. "She's testifying about what happens to a specific library in rural Maryland if her federation can no longer afford to tell it that grant money exists."