Solvang renews Goleta Library partnership with $100,000 fee increase

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For the past six years, the city of Goleta has operated, staffed, and furnished the Solvang Library thanks to a county decree. Prior to the summer of 2019, Santa Barbara County managed the facility before contracting with Goleta to take the helm of Solvang’s library and three others across the Santa Ynez Valley.

The current contract expires on June 30. During its June 23 meeting, the Solvang City Council approved its renewal, along with a $100,000 annual fee increase attached to it.

“That’s a big nut,” Mayor David Brown said at the meeting. “That’s almost a 50 percent increase. … [Struggling] to justify that.”

Goleta Neighborhood Services Director JoAnne Plummer told the council that when the original 2019 contract went into effect, there was an expectation that the annual fee would be reassessed “year after year, then lo and behold, we had the pandemic. So that never happened.”

“There was no increase in what the city of Solvang paid to operate those services,” Plummer continued. “We’ve had no adjustments whatsoever.”

The new contract bumps up Solvang’s annual fee from about $185,000 to $285,000, City Manager Randy Murphy said at the meeting.

After members of the council discussed the possibility of postponing a vote on the contract to explore alternative routes, Murphy described the fee increase as a legitimate request and said that Goleta satisfied staff’s inquiries about the increase.

“I would encourage council to approve the contract for at least one year so that we can keep the library open. We don’t have another meeting until July 14,” Murphy said. “[Solvang’s] finance staff has been in discussion with their finance staff and determined that this is a legitimate amount. … Goleta’s been a good partner. The finance staff poured over this.”

Murphy said that one of the only ways staff could bring back a less expensive contract would be to plan to close the library on more days of the week. It’s currently closed on Sundays and Mondays.

Shortly before the council approved the new contract 4-0 (Councilmember Elizabeth Orona was absent), Plummer agreed to return sometime after October with an update on programs and services that Goleta plans to fund as part of the increase.

Plummer said the fee increase is mostly due to increased costs of business and living in Santa Barbara County and increased fees for the Goleta Library to keep its membership with the Black Gold Cooperative System. The system enables the library to pull books from other libraries within the system. 

“In the last five years, when there were other agencies that pulled out of that Black Gold Cooperative, that escalated our costs significantly,” Plummer said. “We’ve had to spread that around.”

This article appears in Jun 26 – Jul 6, 2025.