State Funding Helps Redondo Beach Turn the Page on Library : Services: At a time when others are limiting hours or shutting down, intense lobbying has resulted in $10 million for construction of a much-needed facility.

For decades, Redondo Beach’s Main Library was a quaint but seismically unsafe building with just three electrical outlets and a urinal that doubled as a book drop. The poorly lighted, seaside library at Veterans Park held 90,000 volumes in a building designed for 20,000. It had a leaky roof, inadequate parking and no emergency exits.

If Redondo Beach, like many other Los Angeles-area cities, had to depend on the county to pay for its library services, it would probably be fighting to keep its library’s doors open. But the city’s independent library system, which moved its books to temporary quarters in 1991, has other plans. Next week, it will break ground on a new main library next to City Hall.

Helping to make the $14-million project possible is a $10-million state grant that Redondo Beach officials landed after a tenacious, long-shot lobbying effort. The city will pay the remaining $4 million in construction costs with city redevelopment funds and transportation grants and will also pay for day-to-day library operations.

Next week’s groundbreaking stands in sharp contrast to the cutbacks in library staffing and hours in numerous Los Angeles-area communities where libraries are funded by the county. The reductions are the result of spending cuts by county officials, who have been faced with huge budget deficits.

“I feel very sad for other cities that don’t have the money to do it,” said library patron Stacie Robinson, 24, who checks out books twice a week for herself and her two children. “But I also feel very fortunate that I live in Redondo Beach.”

Built in 1930 for $50,000, the Redondo Beach Main Library sparked controversy from the start. Although the two-story building was a unique hybrid of Spanish and colonial revival architecture--it had arched windows, decorative ironwork, interior murals and Dutch gables--many residents did not like its location.

Editorials at the time complained that the library, designed by the city’s former library commissioner, architect Lovell Bearse Pemberton, was set too far back in Veterans Park. Residents, some of whom petitioned for another site, worried that the library would not attract many readers because it would be invisible from the street once the surrounding area was developed.

Then the Depression hit California. Revenue shortfalls forced library commissioners to cut the $15,000-a-year budget in half. Hours were slashed and, in 1933, the city asked the Los Angeles County library system to take over operations. Four years later, when the city was in better financial shape, the county returned control of the library to the city.

During the next few decades, the library flourished. As the collection grew, so did the library’s devoted cadre of patrons. In 1957, the Redondo Beach Main Library became the first non-university public library in the state to have a divided card catalogue listing books by both subject and author, according to John W. Perkins, the head librarian at the time.

The books, however, already had outgrown the stacks. Patrons increasingly complained about having to walk through the park at night to get to the building. Others said the library was simply too hard to find.

By the early 1960s, Perkins urged the city to build another main library next to City Hall. When the City Council disagreed, Perkins quit.

“I said, ‘Are you going to move the library or aren’t you?’ ” Perkins, now retired, recalled. “They said no and I said goodby. There was no future.”

After Perkins’ departure, one library supporter says, the library seemed to stagnate and fall into disrepair. But it would take about 30 years--and the passage of the California Library Construction Bond Act of 1988--before city leaders would come around to Perkins’ viewpoint.

The bond, which provided $75 million for public library construction and renovation, offered the city a unique opportunity to build a library. Under the terms of the bond act, state funds would finance 65% of any approved project and city or county funds would supply the rest.

Competition for the grant was fierce. In a preliminary survey, officials from more than 200 libraries statewide expressed interest in applying for the money. To save library officials the expense and time of filling out the lengthy application, which would include environmental reports and architect’s plans, state officials promised to provide early rankings of applicants’ competitiveness.

To capture the state’s attention, Redondo Beach city officials made two videos illustrating their library’s plight.

In one of them, former Councilwoman Kay Horrell took viewers on a walking tour through the library, which now is vacant and may be turned into a community center. The high ceilings, she noted, made the main room extremely noisy. Glare from the ocean created difficulty for those reading at high noon. She guided the camera toward some crumbling ceiling tiles under a leak in the roof and up a narrow, winding staircase that was inaccessible to the disabled.

In what many said was the video’s highlight, Horrell took viewers into the library’s only bathroom where she gracefully pointed out that the urinal did double-duty after hours as a book drop.

Due in part to the video, which state officials showcased as a model for other grant seekers, Redondo Beach was ranked 34th out of 104 applicants. The following month, in December, 1990, the City Council voted to apply for the grant.

“We figured if we worked harder than everybody else, we could shoot up to the next band of competitiveness,” said Community Facilities Manager Ed Hayduk.

For the next two months, Hayduk and Library Director Shari L. Petresky worked nonstop on he grant application. In that time, the city had to hire an architect, design the proposed library and draw up building plans. At 1 a.m. the day before the application was due, Hayduk was on the phone with the architect getting final cost estimates. The next day, Hayduk flew to Sacramento to deliver the application to state officials.

On the first grant cycle, state library officials awarded Redondo Beach a $10-million grant. Of the 22 projects the bond act eventually funded--including Mid Valley Regional Library in Los Angeles--Redondo Beach’s was the largest.

“The need was obvious to us,” said Richard B. Hall, the state library bond act manager. “You’ve got to be able to communicate your situation. And their video in particular was an exceptionally well-documented job that just made it painfully obvious what their need was.”

Library officials say the city will spend less operating the new library than it currently spends on the temporary facility, which costs $464,000 annually in rent.

The new library, a two-story, contemporary building with underground parking, will have 49,000 square feet of space, enough to allow for growth over the next 20 years. The library’s first floor will house reference stacks, fiction and nonfiction stacks, a bookstore, a children’s library and story-hour room, and a public room containing audiovisual equipment, computers, typewriters and copy machines. The second floor will contain staff offices, a kitchen, two conference rooms and a cable studio.

And, for the first time in the city’s history, the library’s catalogue will be computerized.

Not everyone is enthusiastic about the change.

Retired contractor Jake Crawford, 63, who frequently visits the temporary library to browse through business magazines, questioned whether it was wise for the city to spend so much money on a new library.

“I liked the old one much better,” Crawford said. “It was an open-air feeling with the ocean and the breeze coming in. . . . From all the designs I’ve seen of the new library, it’s going to look like a hotel in Las Vegas.”

His comment surprised library officials.

“Most of our clientele can’t wait until we get into the new building,” said Tyna Milo-Carson, a library supervisor in charge of circulation. “The majority think it’s great.”

The library director agreed. “Almost everyone I know is just thrilled to get a new library,” Petresky said. “Redondo Beach residents have waited 60 years for this. Libraries last a long time, so you don’t get a new one too often.”