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A letter to the editor from Carol Campbell in Scotts Valley
EDITOR,
Great news! With the propane tanks gone, the Scotts Valley town center can proceed. And that means, at last, that our new library will be built.
But there’s a catch: Unless we pass Measure R in the June election, about the time the new library appears, there won’t be any money to staff it and run all the regional programs we users so value.
Measure R is not a new tax. It simply makes permanent the quarter-cent sales tax levy we adopted in 1996, now scheduled to sunset in 2013. That income funds 51 percent of the library system’s operating budget, and it has given us exactly what was promised: additional services and items for checkout, and, crucially, staff to enable many more open hours.
It is the revenue source that will fund the new, bigger Scotts Valley branch as a full-scale working library — and will sustain the programs city and area residents value so strongly: homework help, story hours, reading discussion groups, online databases, and so many more.
And there’s good reason to act this year to make the levy permanent, even though it’s five years before sunset. Without the assurance of continued sales tax revenue, crucial long-term financial planning can’t take place.
The downside of a cutoff of the quarter-cent levy is too horrendous to contemplate, a wreckage of the libraries that are such a dynamically valuable part of our community. Let’s remove that possibility from the future at the same time that we reward our foresight by making the tax permanent — a guarantee that we and our growing children will have our libraries as an ongoing, permanent resource.
I urge you to please vote for Measure R on your June ballot!
Carol Campbell, Scotts Valley
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