County Issue / Library Fees :...

Elaine Gonce, Teacher, Moorpark High School

I don’t think libraries should charge fees. When Andrew Carnegie donated funds to set up libraries, they were for the purpose of making knowledge available to the general public. If you’re going to say libraries are for the general public, there are a lot of people who can’t afford a fee. I gave my students a research paper on literary, musical and artistic contributions from the Latin American world, and many of them had to use the Thousand Oaks Library because the Moorpark Library is such a small library with little resources. A lot of kids at Moorpark High are lower-income kids and now they wouldn’t be able to check out books in Thousand Oaks, which would mean their papers wouldn’t be as good and their grades would be affected. A lot of teachers give research papers. This fee would affect a lot of our students. They don’t all live in Peach Hill and Mountain Meadows. If we are going to encourage kids to go to college, we need to make everything available that would support it. Without support systems, it’s hard to tell kids that anybody can make it. You can’t put a limit on resources.

Barbara Wilson, President, Friends of the Thousand Oaks Library

If money was not an object, I would not object to libraries being open to everyone, without some kind of a fee being charged. The libraries are a high priority within the community. Part of the reason we have outstanding libraries is that many people in the community have invested their time and effort in them. The communities around us have dropped the ball. The $55 fee is very reasonable. I’ve worked it out, and it’s a little more than $1 a week or about 16 cents a day to use one of the finest public libraries in Southern California. I feel it’s fair to charge the library fee. If the state wants the local libraries to be provided for free, they should be putting more money into libraries. It seems unfair that the very people who live within the community are kept from that service because of so much use from people in communities where library services have not been made a priority. It seems to me it’s really unfair for residents of a community to be provided with less than good service in order to provide service to people outside the area.

Dixie Adeniran, Director, Ventura County Library Services Agency

Ideally, libraries would not feel that they need to charge a service fee. Ideally, public library service should have invisible boundaries to library users. Ideally, citizens throughout the state of California should be able to have equal access to library resources. The state itself has tried to encourage local public libraries to share their resources by offering incentive payments to libraries that are lenders of materials. Ideally and philosophically, I believe the barrier fees ought not to be imposed. Because of the funding choices and capabilities of local government, things get out of whack sometimes. A local jurisdiction may feel compelled to make the choice to charge a fee. I find it a very unfortunate situation when that arises. In the particular case of Thousand Oaks, there is the situation in which there is a regional shopping center that does in fact draw clientele from beyond the boundaries of the city. Those people are most definitely contributing to sales taxes, and yet the door is shut when it comes to the possibility of using the library services there.

David Ross, Former Oak Park official and current Oak Park resident

People who live adjacent to those cities pay taxes to those cities by shopping there. They are not receiving municipal services for free. If they don’t want me coming to their libraries, then I’m not going to go into their city to shop, and I estimate that other non-resident library users feel the same. It might cost the city $800,000 a year or more in lost sales taxes. I got this figure by looking at my Visa card statements and figuring the sales tax payments to Thousand Oaks and multiplying that total by 30,000, representing the potentially offended non-resident library users. The state was providing a subsidy based on the amount of non-resident library use. That is canceled with this fee. They talk about the need for revenue in their press releases, but at the City Council meeting the main issue was to drive away 35,000 non-resident library users from their overcrowded library in Thousand Oaks. I’m aware of campaigning by other people to solicit pledges from non-residents to boycott shopping in Thousand Oaks. I’ve already stopped shopping in Thousand Oaks.

Ed Tennen, Director of Library Services, Moorpark College

Ideally, I think that libraries should be a free service. Historically, libraries have been free services, but the high cost of providing users with the kind of sophisticated services they depend upon,especially technical services, has required some libraries to implement fees to support these services. Libraries, not unlike schools and other government agencies, have not been funded as well as they would like to be. One thing that I think people need to understand is that the library is never meant to be the archive of all the information available to users. It’s a channel for resource sharing that goes on between libraries. My personal opinion is that it’s sad when libraries need to resort to fees like this. At first blush, a fee sounds very negative, but we have to look at it in the terms of the total picture of the economy today. There is a value one must place on retrieving information. Our students use the Thousand Oaks Library, and it could be a problem if they don’t live there. The danger in doing this is that there are people who are economically disadvantaged who would not be able to afford this fee.