Buellton City Council scrutinizes proposed $500 hourly fee for library meeting areas

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Bounce houses. Cocktail hours. Knitting clubs. Members of the Buellton City Council were recently torn on which types of uses it should allow during temporary rentals of the Buellton Library’s meeting rooms and spacious front lawn.

However, all four council members came to a quick consensus on one crucial aspect of city staff’s proposed rental rates for the property’s amenities.

“Five hundred dollars is steep,” Councilmember Hudson Hornick said at the council’s June 26 meeting.

Apart from nonprofits and hosts of city functions, Buellton residents who request to reserve either of the library’s two community rooms or its lawn space would be charged $500 an hour and need to put down a $1,000 deposit, based on staff’s initial rate structure outline.

“I think [our] intention, … was this was a community meeting space. I don’t know if we ever intended or thought about it being an event space,” Mayor David Silva told staff. “I envisioned, … something intimate, smaller in scale [than] a full-blown party. I hadn’t thought of the lawn to be a rental space. … I don’t know how you can throw an event on the lawn that doesn’t negatively impact the experience of the library.”

During the meeting, Councilmembers Hornick and John Sanchez said they believed that the community rooms and lawn would eventually serve event rental purposes to recoup some of the city’s costs to fund the library’s $1 million-plus construction costs.

Both Hornick and Sanchez also agreed that charging $500 as a flat hourly fee wasn’t going to work, regardless of whether the renter is a birthday party host or a local business or committee seeking a meeting space.

“We’re not renting the Hilton ballroom. It’s just a community room,” Sanchez said at the meeting.

Sanchez also described the proposed $1,000 deposit as excessive.

“I don’t know what they could do to cause that much damage, unless they have a campfire on the floor,” he said.

Buellton Public Works Director Rose Hess told the council that staff researched rates from other publicly owned rental facilities in the area while drafting the proposal. 

Mayor Silva said he’d like to see if decreasing the proposed permitted uses—parties with live music or a DJ and food truck-catered events for example—on the library lawn would help make a lower rate and deposit feasible, since liabilities related to cleanup or property damage would be lower.

“Let’s tighten the amenities allowed,” Silva said. “If we tighten it, it’d be great to see the price move down.”

The council ultimately directed staff to look into alternative rental rate options and agendize revisiting the topic at a future hearing.

This article appears in Jul 3-10, 2025.