Supervisor Seeks Aid for Struggling Libraries

With library funds dwindling and deep budget cuts ahead, Ventura County Supervisor Susan K. Lacey will ask her board colleagues Tuesday to consider raising sales taxes or asking voters to approve a special fee designated solely for the struggling branches.

The proposal comes a week after libraries chief Dixie Adeniran alerted local officials that her department is again facing serious cutbacks if permanent funding is not found.

While Lacey is asking only for discussion of a sales tax increase or an initiative on the March, 1996, ballot, she said time is running out for the 16 branches in the county library system. The system serves every city except Santa Paula, Thousand Oaks and Oxnard.

“We need to take a look at what is available to us and what isn’t available to us,” Lacey said. “We need to engage the public in discussion and see what possibilities there are.”

The plan may face an uphill battle, however, with at least one supervisor opposing any tax increase.

State budget cuts have eliminated nearly 50% of county library funding since 1993, and supervisors have been forced to spend General Fund money to keep the branches open.

The county gave its library system an extra $1.6 million in 1993 and another $820,000 last year to maintain services. Some cities also gave money to individual branches to increase hours of operation.

Adeniran will spend $6.7 million this fiscal year maintaining the branches, though the smaller offices are open as few as 16 hours a week. Larger branches are open as much as 36 hours a week, but only with contributions from the cities they serve, she said.

The agency’s highest budget was $10.1 million in 1991-92.

Lacey said she does not know how much of a sales tax or property assessment would be needed to insulate libraries from ongoing cuts.

“That’s what needs to be developed, but we need to keep it as low as possible,” Lacey said. “I don’t have any of those answers. That’s why I’m asking for some real (options) to be put down on paper.”

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Her two-page report to the board concludes with a request that Adeniran report back to supervisors with “timelines, budgets and legal analyses of the various options,” including sales tax increases and a ballot initiative.

“Without some new source of funding, maintaining even minimal library services will be difficult, much less keeping up with the demands of a growing population,” she wrote.

But Supervisor John K. Flynn believes proposing higher taxes now is unrealistic.

“I don’t see that a tax increase is in the cards,” Flynn said. “I don’t think the voters will support it. I don’t think this is the time to put a measure on the ballot. I don’t think it’s going to fly.”

Instead, Flynn said cities across California must join with their county governments in funding the branch offices within their communities.

“The cities and the counties are going to have to form a partnership,” he said. “The cities are going to have to do the same thing that Oxnard and Thousand Oaks have done. They’re going to have to take on a pretty hefty burden of providing library services.”

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Others also are complaining about Lacey’s proposals. Steve Frank, a Thousand Oaks political consultant, said technological advances have rendered Lacey’s permanent funding plan too little, too late.

“There is nothing that the Ventura County libraries could provide in space or books that a single Internet connection couldn’t provide,” he said. Lacey “wants to build buildings when the people just want to get information.”

“It’s no longer needed. What we do need to do is spend our limited library dollars on more computers and more Internet connections and then teaching people how to use them,” Frank said.

But Adeniran said she has done the most with what little resources she has available.

“If this additional financing were allowed, we would be looking at spending part of it on keeping up with the technology that is available,” she said. “But we’ve already done a pretty good job of keeping up with technology.”

Dan Robles, director of the Blanchard Community Library District in Santa Paula, knows firsthand the difficulty in running a library with scarce resources.

“We tried everything that the county library is trying now,” he said. “We approached our city, we looked at becoming a county library branch. But we felt the only way to do it was to get a special assessment passed.”