County Law Library Feels Funding Pinch : Cutback: Rising costs and lack of money have caused it to cancel subscriptions to many important publications.

Normally, the cancellation of a subscription to a periodical called “CCH Utilities Law Reporter” would not be cause for much concern among all that many lawyers.

But these days in San Diego, especially since Southern California Edison announced it wants to take over San Diego Gas & Electric, the loose-leaf periodical--which chronicles the latest developments in the technical field of utilities law--has become much more compelling reading for a lot more lawyers, as well as consumer groups.

But the San Diego County Law Library, a longtime subscriber and the single source in the area where legal periodicals and texts are designed to be available to both lawyers and the public, recently was forced to cancel its subscription.

“It ain’t here no more,” library director Charles Dyer said.

Neither are many other materials. Because of budget woes, 10% of the subscriptions at the library’s central facility downtown have been cut, Dyer said. A full 90% of subscriptions at the library’s three branches across spread-out San Diego County have been slashed, leaving only the most essential California and U.S. Supreme Court materials, he said.

“I do not like having to say what we will be saying a lot more often from now on, and that is, ‘Sorry,’ ” Dyer said. “ ‘Sorry, we really want to help, but we can’t.’ ”

However unwanted, that apology has been heard with increasing frequency in the past few months, and not just in San Diego. Other county law libraries throughout California have instituted their own cutbacks in collections and services. Still others are on the verge of announcing trims.

Hoping to avoid cuts, librarians over the past year have asked for help, eventually managing to get a funding bill through both houses of the Legislature, garnering a grand total of five “no” votes. Gov. George Deukmejian, however, vetoed it.

Now, librarians say, without some sort of relief soon for the rising costs and the deficits that plague many of their facilities, they will keep plunging toward financial ruin, threatening what has been an institution in California since 1891.

“This problem is a statewide problem,” said Richard Iamele, director of the Los Angeles County Law Library and head of the Council of California County Law Librarians. “It’s not just a few libraries. It’s spread from the largest to the smallest. We have a real problem, and it’s a big problem.”

The Santa Barbara County library is no longer open Sundays. It stocks no out-of-state codes, fewer law reviews and only paperback versions of the national court reports, librarian Raymond MacGregor said.

The Ventura County library has slashed evening and weekend hours by one-third, canceled $20,000 in subscriptions, decided not to replace two part-time employees and stopped adding to its self-help collection, librarian Nadine Baker recently told a Los Angeles legal newspaper, the Daily Journal.

The San Francisco library still stocks codes and reports from all states, but has cut its collection of books used to verify that cases have not been overruled, assistant director Coral Henning said. It was considering further cuts when the Oct. 17 earthquake struck, toppling floor-to-ceiling shelves and destroying some of the library’s historical collection, she said.

“We’re at the point where we’re saying, ‘Gee, here’s half a book. Where’s the rest of it?’ ” Henning said.

It may cost as much as $10,000 to repair the earthquake damage, Henning said a few days after the quake. The library doesn’t have the money and, “as a priority, we’re pretty low on the totem pole of getting repairs done.”

The biggest users of the law libraries, of course, are lawyers. But a recent survey by the county librarians revealed that consumers, students and other lay people use the libraries almost as much.

The librarians surveyed 60,538 patrons statewide last February and March and discovered that 42.5% were attorneys, most of whom were either sole practitioners or from firms with fewer than 10 lawyers.

But students, public officials who were neither judges nor court employees, and other lay people accounted for 40.9%, he said.

The county law library “is the one place where average citizens can interface with the laws,” said Tom Stallard, a Sacramento-area attorney and the librarians’ lobbyist. “That’s why we’ve been trying so hard to get something done.”

The county law libraries are creatures of the Legislature, first authorized in 1891 and administered by individual boards of trustees. They are stand-alone entities and are unrelated to the general county libraries.

Over the years, the Los Angeles library actually gained fame as one of the finest law libraries in the nation. It is still renowned today, Iamele said, particularly for its extensive foreign collection.

Since 1891, all the county law libraries have been funded primarily by one revenue source: a fixed share of the fee paid by anyone who files a civil lawsuit in the state courts. The Legislature sets that fee’s maximum level.

In 1891, the fee was $1. Under current law, all counties but Los Angeles are authorized to allot to law libraries up to $12 of the filing fee. Of the $117 it costs to file a civil suit in San Diego Superior Court, for instance, $12 of that goes to the library, County Clerk Robert Zumwalt said.

Because of its larger numbers of civil filings, Los Angeles’ maximum fee is set at $5.

The Legislature last increased the fee maximums in 1980. The reason the libraries are in the fix they’re in today, the librarians said, is that materials and personnel costs have increased dramatically since then, far outpacing revenue.

Last year, the librarians asked Dyer to review the expense side of his ledger, saying they needed representative evidence because they were about to go to the Legislature to ask for a raise.

Dyer found that a legal periodical--commonly, a law review--that cost the San Diego County library $12 in 1980 cost $20.78 in 1987, the last year for which there were complete figures, a 73% increase. A loose-leaf service--like the utilities law reporter--that cost $12 in 1980 was $22.42 in 1987, up 87%, he said.

The number of patrons using the San Diego library climbed from 178,312 in 1982 to 243,248 in 1988, he said. Over the same period, the number of books checked out increased from 33,386 to 40,485. Reference questions went from 13,541 to 62,966, telephone reference questions from 11,339 to 46,785.

Personnel costs in San Diego, based on a calculation linked to the Consumer Price Index, were up 52% from 1980 through 1988, Dyer said. That was more than both Los Angeles, where those costs rose 45%, and the Bay Area, up 48%, he added.

Revenue, Dyer reported, actually had climbed--but then went flat. It rose from less than $1 million in 1983 to $1.5 million in fiscal year 1988, remained at $1.5 million in fiscal year 1989, is $1.5 million this current fiscal year, 1990, and is projected to stay at $1.5 million through fiscal year 1991, he said.

While there were 44,159 filings in San Diego Superior Court in fiscal year 1986, that number went up just barely in 1987 to 45,143, and in 1988 to 45,555, then climbed a bit in 1989 to 48,446, Zumwalt said. “It’s really leveled off for some reason,” he said.

“Nobody really knows what it is,” said the chairman of the San Diego library board’s trustees, South Bay Municipal Judge Murry Luftig. But the same leveling has occurred throughout the state, Stallard said.

All of Dyer’s numbers, meanwhile, added up to a deficit. This year’s budget shortfall in San Diego is estimated at $264,181, Dyer said.

The Los Angeles library’s deficit this year is estimated “in excess of $300,000,” Iamele said. Last month in San Francisco, the library’s expenditures exceeded its income by $17,000, an annual rate of $204,000, Henning said.

Waving those deficit estimates, the librarians went calling earlier this year in Sacramento.

They got then-Sen. Larry Stirling (R-San Diego) to sponsor a bill that would have allowed all counties except Los Angeles to raise the fee-sharing ceiling to $20. In Los Angeles, the maximum would have risen to $10.

In addition, the bill would have authorized a $2 hike in small-claims court filing fees, with the increase earmarked for law library services to small-claims litigants.

The measure passed the Assembly 68 to 5, and, on Sept. 14, the Senate 39 to 0. But shortly afterward, Deukmejian returned SB620 to the Senate without his signature.

In a statement accompanying the move, Deukmejian said he was opposed to the $2 increase in small-claims fees.

“Law libraries are used overwhelmingly by lawyers and court personnel,” he said. “I do not believe that small-claims litigants use these facilities so frequently as to justify increasing their filing fees.”

The librarians were surprised at the reason for the veto because they thought they had demonstrated that the libraries were not used “overwhelmingly” by lawyers and court staff. But no one was more surprised than Stirling, now a San Diego Municipal Court judge, who blamed himself for the veto.

“I was the author of the bill, I should have known, I should have made sure it had clear sailing with the administration,” he said.

Stallard now hopes to convince legislators to excise the offending small-claims fee from a parallel bill that has already been introduced in the Assembly, then get lawmakers to speed that bill through both houses as an urgency measure. Emergency bills take effect as soon s the governor signs them, but the earliest this scenario would provide any relief is March, Stallard said.

“I’m cautiously optimistic, but this route is certainly one I’m willing to pursue,” he said.

In the meantime, the libraries have been left wondering how to get by.

Because SB620 seemed a sure bet, the San Diego board, like others, had been covering expenditures with a reserve fund. That practice meant, of course, that trustees were spending more money than the library was taking in, but trustees typically were reluctant to cut services and figured the money would be made up when the bill went through, said Luftig, the chairman of the San Diego board.

So the reserve dwindled. About $600,000 three years ago, it currently is $189,000 and, if there is no change in spending, will be exhausted by next September, Dyer said.

The reserve in Santa Barbara County, $35,000 three years ago, drops by $1,000 a month, meaning that without further cuts, the library will have all of $200 left by next June, library director MacGregor said.

Rather than find itself flat broke, the San Diego board, at two meetings in early October, decided to cut its outlays. Faced with cutting staff or subscriptions, the board chose subscriptions, Luftig said.

Those subscription cuts are believed to be the first extensive cuts announced in the state since the veto, Dyer said. The board opted to maintain only a core set of materials at the branches in Vista, El Cajon and Chula Vista. Loose-leaf services, such as the utilities reporter, were among the first to go downtown because they can be among the easiest to bring back to speed, Luftig said.

“Alarming,” Michael Shames, a lawyer and executive director of the Utility Consumers Action Network, a group opposed to the Edison-SDG&E; merger, said of the decision to cut the utilities subscription. “Groups like ours that do not have regular access to those kinds of documents and periodicals look to the county law library. In fact, I use the county law library for a lot of my research.”

After its meetings earlier this month, the board also announced that it had started scratching for money from other sources.

The trustees found that the state Public Employees Retirement System owed it $84,142, a bookkeeping matter, Dyer said. The board also asked the county’s Superior Court judges to recommend to the county supervisors that certain fines the judges impose be directed to the library for a year.

The judges have since gone along, but the matter is not yet before the supervisors, said attorney Thomas J. Warwick Jr., one of the library trustees.

San Diego area lawyers have been contacted and say they want to help. Marc Adelman, the president of the San Diego County Bar Assn., said he has asked his membership for “contacts to help us with this dilemma.”

But if the Legislature doesn’t come through with some sort of help by early next year, there will be further cuts, Luftig said.

“If things don’t start to break better for the library, we’ll have to shut the doors at the branches and pare sets at the main library,” Luftig said. “It’s a disaster, a complete disaster.

“We have limited dollars,” he said. “This marvelous concept of a free law library for the citizens of the county, that’s been in existence a lot longer than I’ve been a lawyer, it’s in real trouble today.”