Panel Favors Chipping In Funds to Keep 2 Libraries Open Longer : Ventura: Backers urge more hours for Wright and Foster branches. Recommendation now goes to full council.

Facing a room packed with ardent library boosters, a Ventura council committee broke course with past tradition Wednesday and recommended that the city chip in $145,000 to keep two branches open longer each week.

Councilmen Steve Bennett and Gregory L. Carson, members of the council’s Finance Committee, said they will ask the full council to approve the extra funding. The third committee member, Councilman Jack Tingstrom, was absent.

In addition to the extra 13 hours a week between January and August, the money would pay for an automatic checkout machine at the H. P. Wright Library in mid-town Ventura.

“I really was very pleasantly surprised,” said Yvonne Esler, one of 30 residents who jammed the narrow, wood-paneled meeting room in a show of support for local libraries. “I’m glad the city is looking at the importance of libraries in this community.”

Currently, neither H. P. Wright on Day Road nor E. P. Foster Library in downtown operates more than 20 hours a week. A staff of 10 employees shuttles between the two facilities.

The county pays for the libraries through property tax monies, but with funding increasingly short, it has had to cut the library budget back dramatically in recent years.

The committee’s recommendation does not guarantee that the libraries will win support from the full council, which has repeatedly refused to contribute city money for fear that county officials will use that as an excuse to cut back county funding even more.

Last month, in fact, Bennett warned the city’s library advisory board that it stood little chance of winning financial support for its cause.

“I would be very surprised if the council said, ‘Yep, let’s do this,’ ” he told the board Nov. 16.

Wednesday, however, after weeks of mounting community pressure to do something, Bennett voted to cut a check to pay for more hours. The cash will come out of onetime funds, meaning that there is no certainty that the city will be able to repeat the funding in the 1995-96 fiscal year.

Carson also approved the recommendation, although he warned that the city may be heading down a course it cannot easily reverse.

“Once we’re in the library game, we’re in the library game,” he said. “To think we’ll be able to get out of it later, we’re kidding ourselves.”

The city’s money would add eight hours to Wright Library’s schedule and five to the schedule at Foster. A recent library fund-raising drive brought in $7,677 from residents, allowing Wright to stay open two hours later Wednesdays and Foster to begin operating two hours earlier Saturdays.

Currently, Wright is open from 2 to 8 p.m. Mondays, noon to 6 p.m. Wednesdays and 1 to 5 p.m. Saturdays. Foster is open from noon to 8 p.m. Tuesdays, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Thursdays and 1 to 5 p.m. Saturdays.

The recent fund-raising efforts also paid for the Avenue Library, the city’s smallest branch, to open at 1 p.m. instead of 2 p.m. Mondays. The Avenue branch on Ventura Avenue nearly closed two years ago, but a donations drive then collected enough money to keep it open until June, 1996.

The Finance Committee and the residents at the meeting agreed that the present recommendation to spend $145,000 can only be a Band-Aid solution. In the long-term, they said, the city must find a new home for its entire library collection.

One site mentioned repeatedly at the meeting is a vacant furniture store at the Buenaventura Mall. Carson, however, said the building will need extensive and costly retrofitting.

The council committee’s recommendation came in response to a library board vote last month to ask the city for funding.

The board has also come under increasing pressure from library administrators and residents to do something about the situation at Foster and Wright. Some board members wanted to shut Wright, at least temporarily, and move all its books to Foster so it could operate 40 hours a week.

That proposal, however, met with fierce resistance from other board members as well as many eastside residents, and it was shelved.

Wright is far more popular with readers than Foster, circulating nearly 225,000 books a year to Foster’s 107,000.

But Foster is the county’s main reference library, with a collection of 133,000 volumes.