New Library Board to Hold 1st Meeting

The newly created Orange County Library Advisory Board will meet for the first time tonight in Irvine to begin planning the library system’s future. The board will also discuss ways to monitor current operations.

The committee was created on the recommendation of some of the city managers in the county. These officials unveiled a proposal last year to keep the financially troubled county system intact while giving individual cities more control over the funding and operation of their branches.

Some cities, such as Irvine, had been threatening to pull out of the county system and run their libraries independently. To head off that possibility, the Board of Supervisors endorsed a library advisory board made up of city officials.

“It was a solution to keep the system from collapsing, to give a stronger voice to our users,” County Librarian John Adams said.

A city council member from each of the 21 cities in the county library system has joined the board, along with two county supervisors. First on the agenda tonight will be choosing a chairman and an executive committee for the group, which will establish bylaws and determine how often the board will meet.

Adams said the smaller, executive committee may choose to meet more often than the full board, particularly since there are so many members. “I anticipate very lengthy meetings with a group this size,” he said. “They all want to be there, and they will all have something to say.”

The advisory committee will make recommendations to the Board of Supervisors on how the library system should spend its money, including how much should be set aside for books, centralized services and the needs of individual branches.

Adams will give a “state of the library system” talk at tonight’s meeting, which starts at 5 at the Heritage Park Regional Library, 14361 Yale Ave. Information: (714) 551-7151.