Pasadena’s OK of Special Tax Is One for the Books : Election: Four out of five people who went to the polls voted for the measure to bolster the city’s library system.

Five youngsters raised $50 by selling lemonade. One boy from northwest Pasadena sent $1.05 and a heartfelt plea. Volunteers made 15,000 phone calls and blanketed the city with canvassers. Library employees--most of whom had forsaken pay raises to keep the doors open--chipped in additional donations.

In what campaign organizers say could become a prototype for revenue-starved communities all over the state, a grass-roots effort, run much like a political campaign, defied the political odds Tuesday, winning easy approval for a $1.3-million tax to bolster Pasadena’s library system.

Four out of five people who went to the polls voted for the tax in an election that, with a 27.3% turnout, outdrew a contest for Pasadena City Council and Board of Education seats in March.

The campaign consisted largely of directing a wave of pro-library sentiment into an organized movement.

Under the 13-year guidance of library director Edward Szynaka, the library has energetically catered to its patrons, offering special programs for Armenian and Latino readers, lecture series by authors and other outreach programs. More than 60% of the city’s 132,000 residents hold library cards.

“When you have an activist library system that’s been reaching out for a decade, you touch a lot of people, and those people respond when you call for help,” said Fred Register, campaign manager for Save Pasadena’s Library.

The challenge was to find those voters most likely to support the tax measure and motivate them to go to the polls.

To pass, the tax required the approval of two-thirds of the voters. The levy will draw an extra $20 a year from each house, $13 from each apartment and $147 from each non-residential parcel.

Save Pasadena’s Library raised $200,000 in three months and used supportive community and political leaders to help shepherd the electorate toward the voting booths.

The campaign was devised largely by Register, who co-managed Los Angeles County Supervisor Gloria Molina’s state Assembly campaign in 1982 and worked in Atty. Gen. John K. Van De Kamp’s unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign in 1990.

Pro-tax canvassers said they had the advantage of promoting a special tax, whose revenues would be earmarked for the library rather than funneled into the city’s general fund.

“Having a say in where the money actually went--that made people feel comfortable,” said Thelma Vickroy, a homemaker who volunteered in the door-to-door effort.

Ultimately, the pro-library sentiment overcame the political doldrums that affect most summer elections, organizers said. The final count was 14,247 for the tax and 3,608 against it.

“For a single-issue election, held on the first day of summer, it was an extraordinary turnout,” said John Fuhrman, a corporate computer expert and former Democratic Assembly candidate in Pasadena.

Added writer and television personality Digby Diehl, one of the campaign’s main point men: “It took a lot of guts in the middle of a recession to say, ‘OK, I’ll bite the bullet. I’m going to take more tax.’ ”

Even the heavily outspent opposition marveled at the flood of mailers and the army of canvassers they faced. There were campaign materials fashioned for specific voting groups, such as Republicans and Latinos. One late item even included an invitation to readers of the Pasadena Star News to cancel their subscriptions and hand the money over to the library after the paper ran an editorial plea by the publisher that voters reject the measure.

“The voters were deluged with 10 or 11 different mailings, including a poignant picture of a little girl and her mother facing a padlocked library door,” said Gus Martin, a Pasadena businessman active in the opposition. “I guess anything is fair in politics.”

According to the California Assn. of Realtors, which keeps track of local tax measures, fewer than a quarter have been successful in recent years. Last year, California voters approved only 15 of 67 such measures. Special taxes to aid schools did much better, with 13 out of 21 approved.

Looming over Tuesday’s election was a budget crunch in Pasadena, with a projected shortfall of about $9.3 million.

Without the additional $1.3 million from the library tax, officials said, the eight branch libraries would close in January and service at the Central Library would be reduced from six days a week to five.

Library patrons had already seen an erosion of services in the past three years, including the closing of the Central Library on Mondays and on weekday mornings. The branch libraries were open only four days a week, and the budget for purchasing new books was down by two-thirds.

Popular books such as Stephen King novels had waiting lists of as many as 170 people, library officials said.

In a show of devotion, most of the librarians and clerical workers had elected last spring to forgo pay raises of 3.5% to 4%, saving about $100,000 for the library budget.

The city’s civic Establishment signed on en masse, with everybody from the Armenian National Committee and the Pasadena Police Officers Assn. to the PTA Council and Dodger pitcher Orel Hershiser supporting the tax.

The tax is intended to restore library services to 1989 levels, with longer hours and a substantially larger book budget, among other objectives.

Szynaka said the Central Library would be reopened on Mondays and branch libraries would be reopened an additional weekday by September.

“It took three years to take this thing apart. I hope that in 2 1/2 months we’ll be able to bring everything back on line,” he said.

The opposition, outspent by more than 25 to 1, charged that the pro-tax group was resorting to scare tactics. The City Council would never close the branch libraries, they claimed, because there were too many people who cared about them.

“What (the City Council has) to do is make the library a priority,” said one tax opponent, claiming that there was plenty of fat in the city budget to redirect toward the library.

But the opponents, whose sole civic support came nominally from the Chamber of Commerce and from Councilman Isaac Richard, never got their message across. As the pro-tax group staged a mock funeral for the libraries and waged an aggressive door-to-door campaign, the tax opponents made their views known by distributing personal letters.

“Some of our group were very politically naive, and they didn’t see what was coming down the line,” said one opponent.