Cities, County Grapple With Library Issue : Improvements: Agoura Hills, Westlake Village and Calabasas cannot reach a consensus on a facility that would best serve the public.

Writing an English class term paper is difficult enough, even when the research materials are conveniently at hand. But when one has to go to another county merely to find a critique of the works of D. H. Lawrence, for example , the task can become downright frustrating.

Danielle Hauptman, a senior at Agoura High School, knows. When she was writing a research paper on Lawrence recently, Hauptman, 17, found the Los Angeles County Public Library’s Las Virgenes branch, a few blocks from her Agoura Hills home, lacking.

“They don’t have enough books,” she said. “It’s not very up-to-date.”

So like hundreds of other Las Virgenes-area residents, she headed west across the Ventura County line to the Thousand Oaks Library, where she found what she needed.

Hauptman’s plaint about the Las Virgenes facility is echoed by library users in the nearby communities of Westlake Village and Calabasas. Although the area’s former villages have grown into full-blown suburbs over the past two decades, they are still served by the crowded, 7,500-square-foot library built in 1970 on Roadside Drive near Kanan Road.

Local and county officials agree that the Las Virgenes library--recently supplemented by a one-room satellite facility in Calabasas City Hall and a bookmobile--is inadequate for the 60,000 or so residents who live between Woodland Hills and Thousand Oaks.

But the county and the cities of Calabasas, Agoura Hills and Westlake Village disagree on what improvements are needed. The county wants to build one large regional library, but Westlake Village is insistent on having its own.

Last summer, the county and the cities began sorting out their differences. In the meantime, residents who could not find what they needed in the Las Virgenes library’s collection of 68,000 items continued heading to Thousand Oaks, which has a collection nearly five times as large.

But the discussions took on a new urgency in the fall when Thousand Oaks officials, tired of the residents of other cities using their library, imposed a $55 fee for non-residents. That caused use of the Las Virgenes library, which remained free to Los Angeles County residents, to shoot up 30%, librarian Sy Rimer said.

And that increase highlighted the facility’s limitations.

For instance, the library has only 29 parking spaces, a fourth of which are used daily by library staff. Even though the library’s collection is limited, it is one of the busiest in the county system.

To help residents who want to continue using the Thousand Oaks Library, Westlake Village pays a portion of their fee.

With that stopgap measure in place, Westlake Village officials are also working independently of their neighbors to secure a longer-term solution.

Westlake Village has flatly rejected the idea of a regional library, which the three cities would build but the county would stock and staff. Instead, Westlake Village is planning a 6,000-square-foot facility that would be part of the county library system. As with all new county library facilities, the city would provide the library building and the county would stock and staff it.

At the same time, Westlake Village is trying to eventually divorce itself from the county library system. To get the money to do that, however, the city would have to get special state legislation approved that would allow it to keep its $328,000 share of local property taxes designated for county libraries.

Mayor Berniece Bennett said Westlake Village has no intention of leaving the county library system immediately. But, she said, legislation sponsored by state Sen. Ed Davis (R-Santa Clarita) would give the city the option of eventually building a 15,000-square-foot library.

“This bill is for when we are talking about a library in our city at our expense,” Bennett said, adding that the city proposed the bill only after a series of frustrating negotiations with the county.

Bennett claims that county library officials had agreed to build the city a larger library, but then backed away from that promise.

“They pulled the rug out from under us,” Bennett said. “We are not opposed to a regional library, but we are at this time.” She said spending the city’s portion of the tax money to pay for a library that would be built elsewhere is not “in the best interest of our residents.”

County library spokesman Phil Fleming said Westlake Village was never told that it would get a 15,000-square-foot library.

“We felt that a 5,000-square-foot library was quite adequate, and they looked at us like we were trying to sell them a broken-down VW,” Fleming said.

Fleming said the county would still like the cities to build a single regional facility of about 25,000 square feet.

But the only city to support that type of project has been Agoura Hills, where the regional library would be built on donated land.

Agoura Hills has agreed to put its own library plans on hold to see if Calabasas will join the project. But Calabasas officials last year voted against joining Agoura Hills in building the facility because they feared that it would be too expensive.

Calabasas Councilwoman Karyn Foley, the sole dissenting vote, is trying to persuade the council to reconsider the matter.

Comparing Libraries

Thousand Oaks Library

Number of items: 317,000. Size: 62,000 square feet.

Year built: 1982. Annual circulation: About 1.5 million items.

Hours of operation: 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Thursday, closed Friday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday.

Special collections: Large video and audio tape collection, classic radio scripts.

Las Virgenes Library

Number of items: 68,000, with access within a few days to the 5 million items in the county library system.

Size: 7,500 square feet. Year built: 1970.

Annual circulation: 250,000 items.

Hours of operation: 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Wednesday, 12 p.m. to 6 p.m. Thursday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday.

Special Collections: Local history, the Holocaust and children’s books as well as audio and video cassettes.