VanderKolk Still Wants Oak Park to Join Library Project

Ventura County Supervisor Maria E. VanderKolk wants the community of Oak Park to join with the neighboring Los Angeles County city of Agoura Hills to create a large regional library despite strong opposition by some Oak Park leaders.

VanderKolk told her fellow supervisors at last week’s board meeting that Oak Park’s teaming up with Agoura Hills to build the regional library would demonstrate how communities can creatively pool resources to cope with state funding cuts. “I really hope that will happen,” she said.

But some Oak Park leaders and school officials said they were startled and even angry that their supervisor persists in her support of a regional library after a group of residents voiced objections in a meeting with her last month.

“The fact that she’s not listening to the community is very disappointing,” said Susan Hearn, superintendent of the Oak Park Unified School District. “Besides that, I’m angry.”

VanderKolk’s proposal, Hearn said, would hurt the children of Oak Park because it could virtually empty out the Oak Park High School library.

Under an agreement between the Ventura County Library Services Agency and the school district, the high school library doubles as a community library, with 15,000 of the facility’s 20,000 books belonging to the public library and the rest to the school.

But Oak Park would pull out of the Ventura County library system if it joined in building the Agoura Hills library. The $155,000 in local property taxes that supports the community library, and possibly most of the books now in the facility, would be sent across the Los Angeles County line.

That would leave the school district to fend for itself in stocking and running its own high school library, which it can’t afford, Hearn said.

In addition, Oak Park children who wanted to use the regional library would be walking or riding their bikes along the most dangerous section of Kanan Road and across the Ventura Freeway overpass, Hearn and other community leaders said.

The Agoura Hills facility is planned to be built with or without Oak Park’s financial help. It will be located just east of Kanan Road and south of the Ventura Freeway.

Hearn’s comments echoed the concerns expressed by residents at a June 21 community meeting called by VanderKolk and Ventura County library officials.

At the meeting, only two of about 35 residents and school officials spoke in support of VanderKolk’s proposal for the community to contribute $800,000 to $1 million in accumulated developer fees plus the $155,000 in annual property taxes toward a regional library.

Most of the residents and all of the school officials who spoke at the community meeting said they want to keep their library in Oak Park, either by expanding the present facility at the high school or constructing a new, larger building nearby.

County library officials said a new Oak Park community library would have 5,000 to 9,000 square feet of area and about 45,000 volumes.

In contrast, the Agoura Hills library will have 25,000 square feet and 170,000 volumes. If Oak Park contributed money to the project, the library would be even larger.

Ron Stark, a member of the Oak Park Municipal Advisory Council who attended the community meeting, said last week he was caught off guard when VanderKolk continued to push for a regional library.

“I’m really surprised,” Stark said. “Most of the community leaders, both the elected and appointed, were at that meeting.”

But VanderKolk said she’s not convinced the 35 people at the community meeting represented the views of all Oak Park residents on the library issue.

“I have gotten calls on both” sides, she said.

VanderKolk warned that Oak Park residents may not be able to use the Agoura Hills library if they don’t contribute money to it. Many community residents now depend on the Las Virgenes Library in Agoura Hills as a backup to their own small facility.

But the new Agoura Hills library could decide to charge fees for library cards to people who don’t live in the city, just as Thousand Oaks has done, she said. A Los Angeles County library official confirmed that such fees are possible, although they are not planned at this time.

In addition, VanderKolk said Oak Park residents may not realize that the community cannot afford a good-sized, well-equipped library on its own, particularly with the state’s threat to cut the county’s library funding by 40%.

“I’m their representative, and I need to try to do what they want,” the supervisor said. “But I know in my mind that one of the solutions to these horrible financial problems we have is the sharing of resources,” she said. “No matter what I do, probably 50% of the people are going to be happy with it and 50% are not.”

Times staff writer Daryl Kelley contributed to this story.