Consultant to Help County on Library Questions : Services: Supervisors vote to spend up to $100,000 to come up with a plan that takes into account tighter budgets and cities that are unhappy enough to break away.

Faced with tight budgets and restive clients, county supervisors voted Tuesday to spend up to $100,000 for a consultant to help them decide what to do with the county’s libraries.

The supervisors asked David M. Griffith & Associates, a Cupertino consulting firm, to return in three months with a plan that outlines several possible futures for the library system. High on the list: Giving local governments a greater say.

“Cities want more control over the services they receive,” Supervisor William G. Steiner said. “I want to find a way to provide good library services that are not jeopardized by the county’s financial crisis.”

Orange County operates 27 branch libraries. Nine cities operate their own libraries.

Several factors have put the future of the county’s system in question. One is money.

Two years ago, state legislators drastically scaled back the amount of money set aside for county libraries. That helped shrink the budget for Orange County’s libraries by 35%.

The county government tried to make up some of the difference last year, but the government’s bankruptcy has since made that impossible.

The overall result: In 1993, the county library budget was $27 million. Today, it is about $18 million.

“We were very hard-hit,” County Librarian John M. Adams said.

As the budget cuts began to result in fewer days and shorter hours of operation at some libraries, residents in several cities have grown unhappy with the quality of the services they were getting and have taken their complaints to their local city councils.

Several cities are now considering breaking away from the county system, keeping the tax money they pitch in, and running their own libraries.

The City Council in Mission Viejo, for instance, voted to secede from the county system at the beginning of next year. The city of Irvine is on its way. And officials in Costa Mesa are considering a similar move.

Hence the study approved Tuesday by the supervisors. They hope it will help them decide what to do: whether and how to revamp the system or turn over the whole thing to the cities.

“This study will give us a useful tool to evaluate our libraries,” Supervisor Jim Silva said.

But some city leaders say the time to woo them back into the county system has long passed.

“It’s way too little, way too late,” said Sherri M. Butterfield, a Mission Viejo councilwoman who led her city out of the county system. “It’s amazing that it has taken the county this long to do something.”

Mission Viejo’s sole library was built 24 years ago, when the city had a population of about 15,000. Today, Mission Viejo has about 90,000 people, but the library--a 9,000-square-foot building--is unchanged.

“It’s like a bookmobile without wheels,” Butterfield said.

Butterfield said city leaders had begged the county for years for a new library but never got anywhere. On its own, the City Council is moving ahead with plans to build a new $6-million public library.

Not every city is intent on striking out on its own. Breaking away from the county system would force individual cities to pay for libraries on their own. That could prove difficult for some of the county’s smaller cities.

Even the larger ones are having second thoughts. Irvine City Manager Paul O. Brady Jr. said the city council, which voted to break with the county system at the end of 1996, is keeping its options open.

“We are contributing $2.8 million to the county system, and we want to make sure that we get $2.8 million back,” Brady said.

In other action, the supervisors agreed to spend up to $35,000 for an alarm system for the clerk-recorder’s office. The office has been broken into twice this year. County Clerk-Recorder Gary L. Granville said he would move quickly to purchase the system.

“I’m not going to spend a lot of time on it,” he said.