For years, the amount and source of library funding has been among the most contentious topics discussed during Santa Barbara County’s annual budget process.
About a year and a half ago, the county Board of Supervisors tried to solve this continuous problem by enlisting a group of stakeholders to review and address two issues in the county’s library system: inequities that exist between locations and recurrent budget deficits.
The group is nearing the end of its work and recently presented the board with how it proposes to address the first issue of inequities. The committee’s full report is slated to appear before the board prior to its meeting on the upcoming year’s budget in June. But with the county facing millions of dollars in expenses and revenue losses as a result of COVID-19, the committee’s proposals may be set aside for the time being.
“Counties are bearing the full brunt of dealing with the impacts of this crisis,” said 3rd District Supervisor Joan Hartmann, who is on the ad hoc committee. “We’re losing revenue, and we have huge costs.”
The county operates an unusual library system. There are four main library locations, with one each in Santa Maria, Lompoc, Goleta, and Santa Barbara. Each of these libraries relies primarily on city revenue for funding, along with some from the county. These libraries also receive funding from the county to operate nearby locations in unincorporated areas or smaller cities. For example, the Santa Maria Library operates the branches in Cuyama, Guadalupe, Los Alamos, and Orcutt.
The county allocates this funding based at a rate of $7.80 per capita, but it’s never enough. According to preliminary budget information presented during the board’s April 13 meeting, after this per capita funding, the nine county branches would have a combined deficit of $658,664. Over the last few years, supervisors have filled this recurrent deficit with one-time funding expenses from the county’s cannabis tax revenue.
The committee hasn’t yet released its report on how to sustainably fund the system so that deficits and one-time expenses are no longer the norm. But Santa Maria City Librarian Mary Housel said the idea of a new tax has been kicked around as a possible solution.
Housel, who sits on the ad hoc committee and oversees the county branches near Santa Maria, said she doesn’t believe the county will ever have enough money to fund libraries fairly without a new revenue stream.
“That’s been looked at many times,” Housel said. “That seems like it will be the only way to achieve the funding we need to make the libraries more equitable.”
Another idea the committee discussed is the creation of a joint powers authority, which is created when multiple public entities combine to make decisions for all jurisdictions involved. She said this could be something that’s created as an expansion of the Santa Barbara County Association of Governments.
“The long-term idea is a joint powers authority where the eight cities in the county work with the county on funding and governing the libraries, so it’s really a collaborative governance,” Hartmann said.
Although the committee hasn’t released its official recommendations regarding this funding issue, Ryder Bailey, the chief financial officer for the county’s Community Services Department, presented the board with the committee’s recommendations on countywide equity during a preliminary budget workshop meeting on April 13.
According to this presentation, the committee grouped the county’s libraries into three different groups titled: Small 1, Small 2, and Medium. The first group includes the smallest branches in Cuyama, Los Alamos, and Vandenberg Village; the second group includes branches in Buellton, Guadalupe, Montecito, and Solvang; and the third group includes branches in Carpinteria, Santa Barbara Eastside, and Orcutt.
The committee created benchmarks—such as number of employees or hours open—that each library should reach, depending on its group. According to Bailey’s presentation, most libraries in the county don’t meet these benchmarks, and libraries in North County meet fewer of these standards than those farther south.
“Ours were [below the standards] in almost every case,” Housel said. “I feel like we do a really good job with what we have, which isn’t very much.”
Two significant expenses that Housel has to cover in the branches she oversees are the costs of rent for the locations in Orcutt and Guadalupe, which limit how much funding can be used on staffing, books, or technology.
Amelia Villegas, the president of the Friends of the Guadalupe Library and city employee who sits on the county’s Library Advisory Committee, said the city has contributed additional money toward rent in recent years, but it’s often limited financially on what it can fund. To address this issue, Villegas wrote a letter to the Board of Supervisors requesting it to consider increasing the per capita funding for libraries from $7.80 to $11.70.
“It just becomes a very frustrating issue every year when we need to look for funds,” Villegas said.
According to Bailey’s presentation during the April 13 preliminary budget workshop meeting, funding all the proposed improvements that would allow all libraries to meet the benchmarks the committee identified would require nearly $650,000, which is on top of the nearly $660,000 needed to cover the projected deficits.
Supervisors directed staff to include funding to cover the library deficits in the proposed budget that the board will look at in June. However, given the uncertainty surrounding the COVID-19 crisis, the supervisors didn’t move forward with the funding for the benchmarks.
Hartmann said that while it’s disappointing to set the committee’s recommendations aside, supervisors felt it would be irresponsible to allocate any additional funding while the county still works out its financial situation amid the COVID-19 pandemic. But she said the committee has accomplished a lot of work that can’t be completely discarded.
“We’ve done a lot of work that is extremely helpful in getting everybody to an understanding of what libraries are and … we have a clear sense of what the libraries need to do,” Hartmann said. “We can’t lose that, too much was invested.”
Reach Staff Writer Zac Ezzone at zezzone@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Apr 23-30, 2020.