‘Wear and Tear’ Taking Hard Toll on Redondo Beach Library

The Redondo Beach Main Library, a $10-million copper and slate monument to learning, manners and civility, celebrated its second anniversary Tuesday. From the looks of it, you’d wonder whether the community meeting rooms upstairs had been the site of a rowdy two-year stampede.

Inside the rooms, each open for public use, the cumulative damage report reads as follows:

Eight of 10 original tables so scratched, defaced or beaten up--some sporting holes clear through--that they’ve had to be replaced. A mystery splotch three feet wide staining one wall. Carpets so grungy they must be cleaned at least once a week. A microphone and three chrome patio ashtrays missing.

And that doesn’t count the routine stuff, like the colorful chewing gum sculptures clinging like barnacles to the undersides of the tables--stuck even to replacement tables in service for a few weeks.

In two years, “only a few” people have owned up to scratches or stains, said the library’s director, Shari L. Petresky, who graciously attributed the damage to “normal wear and tear” but added, “It’s just that it’s a little costly.”

Ten replacement tables, for instance, cost $1,000, she said. Perhaps not an enormous sum but nonetheless considerable, she pointed out, when “your equipment budget is zero.”

In response, the City Council recently voted to impose--for the first time--user fees on the meeting rooms. It now costs at least $5 per hour to use the rooms; until July 1, they had been free during normal business hours.

It’s all enough to make a library director sigh with regret at the times in which we live--in particular, at the seeming indifference, even disrespect, with which the public can treat public facilities. “When we have classes with small children, kindergartners and first graders, we usually ask them if they know who owns the library,” Petresky said.

“After they’ve tried out God and the mayor and the president and various things, we tell them, ‘No, they own the library, it’s theirs and it belongs to them and like anything else that belongs to them, they have to take care of it.’ Usually,” she said, “small children understand that concept.

“I think it’s something that, as we grow up, we forget. It’s ours, all of us. We’re each responsible to see that it’s maintained.”

All things considered, Petresky said, the new library remains in good shape.

Downstairs, where the library shelves the bulk of its 134,000 books and offers state-of-the-art computer services, and youngsters are constantly skittering about a spacious children’s room, matters are essentially under control--with limited graffiti and nary a coffee spill.

“Take coffee as an issue,” Petresky said. “When I was growing up, food and drink were never allowed in the library. Here we constantly have people come in and set up their lunch--and they get upset when we ask them to move it outside. If they don’t, someone inevitably will knock it over and we get stains.

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“And everyone’s got their bottled water,” she said. “It’s like George Carlin said: ‘When did America get so thirsty?’ ”

Regrettably, virtually every library in Los Angeles County has been forced in recent years to confront the issues of changes in personal habits and values in a public place and the possibility of damage, inadvertent or otherwise, to the facilities.

It’s an either-or situation, library officials said Tuesday.

Either take stiff measures to prevent damage, typically with highly visible security guards in and around the carrels and meeting rooms, as is the case with the downtown Los Angeles Public Library, which was renovated extensively before reopening in 1993--or pay for damage when it occurs.

Because, officials said, it will occur.

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Even in upscale Beverly Hills, where a new public library opened in 1990, officials have had to replace about 10 study carrels made of soft wood because they “were treated like a public whittling course,” Director Michael Steinfeld said.

The replacements: tables made of a hard, laminated wood.

In Redondo Beach, the issue is not vandalism. Instead, the problem is attributable to everyone and, yet, no one.

Since opening in 1995, the Redondo library has averaged 68 bookings per month in the upstairs rooms, according to a city report.

Among the users: city commissions as well as sessions organized by or devoted to flight attendants, financial planners, meditation and plastic surgery. “Just about everyone except for Alcoholics Anonymous,” Petresky said.

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Because the rooms have been so heavily used, often with one group following immediately after another into the upstairs rooms, Petresky said, “We don’t know when the damage occurred.” How anyone could create a three-foot blot on textured gray wallpaper, for instance, remains unclear. How it could happen--and not have anyone report it or, better yet, own up to it--remains a more elusive question.

“It’s, I don’t want to say it’s irritating--it’s inconvenient, time-consuming, puzzling mostly,” Petresky said. “It’s puzzling.”