BATON ROUGE - Baton Rouge Mayor-President Sid Edwards wants to cut taxes and give police a raise by taking money from the public library system.

Edwards said the library has a "budget surplus" from "years of overtaxation of citizens."

The city-parish 2025 budget indicates that the library system ended 2023 with a fund balance of just over $116 million. That year, the library took in more than $62 million and spent just over $56 million.

Edwards' plan would require a public vote to shift the money.

Under his proposal, a city-parish millage would drop from 11.1 mills to 9.8 mills, which Edwards says would be the largest tax cut in two decades. The plan would also raise the average pay of Baton Rouge police officers from $40,900 to $58,000.

Additional funding will also be allocated for "improvements to economic development and critical infrastructure," and each councilmember will also receive funding for their district for special projects, according to a press release from Edwards' office.

"Careful consideration has been made to ensure that we will maintain the best publicly-funded library system in the state," the press release quoted Edwards as saying. "I am looking forward to working with the EBR Metro Council to better prioritize how the city-parish spends valuable taxpayer money.”

Mary Stein, the assistant director at the East Baton Rouge Parish Library, disproved of the plan.

"It's not the library that is losing, it's the public," Stein said. 

The mayor's office hopes the Metro Council will approve the proposal in March and it could be on the ballot for a public vote in October.