Commentary: Library supporters respond to Grand Jury report

Felton Library Friends, a chapter of Friends of the Santa Cruz Public Libraries, is dedicated to excellent library collections and services for the residents of Felton, Bonny Doon, Ben Lomond, Brookdale, Zayante, Mount Hermon and Lompico.
Included in the Felton branch’s user population are some 16,000 people, including about 4,000 children. The San Lorenzo Valley Unified School District kindergarten-through-12th-grade public school campus, less than a mile from the branch, serves nearly 500 middle school and nearly 800 high school students from the entire San Lorenzo Valley, as well as nearly 600 kindergarten-through-fifth-grade students. The SLVUSD homeschool headquarters, as well as several private schools and preschools, are located in the Felton branch service area. It also serves more than a thousand seniors, a growing section of the population.
Central to Felton Library Friends’ purpose is support for the Felton Branch Library as an essential component of the community life valued by our library users and support for a new 8,000 square-foot facility that will, for the first time, provide adequate library services to the southern San Lorenzo Valley.
The recently released Santa Cruz Grand Jury report states that “one strategy proposed by library administration in March was the closing of some branches (including Felton and Boulder Creek), leaving the book and materials collections and the computers and turning the facilities over to their communities for use as reading rooms/learning centers.” It then implicitly recommends this strategy “as an intermediate-term strategy to allow the SCPL system to focus and develop the financial foundation necessary to create long-term sustainability for a system that can be expanded again as future revenues increase.”
None of the following issues is discussed in the report: strategies other than branch closings, the effect on communities of closed branches, how reading rooms/learning centers would be funded and staffed in the event a branch were closed, the political implications of branch closings, and the fairness of branch closings in relation to resident contributions to the library system (property and sales taxes). Felton Library Friends strongly supports the coming work of the task force established by the Library Joint Powers Board to explore a variety of scenarios for system sustainability.
Felton Library Friends strongly opposes the closing of community libraries in the San Lorenzo Valley and strongly opposes the assumption that only the smaller libraries should be considered as branches to be served, in part, by volunteers at public service desks. The nearly 30,000 residents in the San Lorenzo Valley make up a significant subsection of the population that supports the library through sales and property taxes. The same population has been grossly underserved from the beginning of the Joint Powers Authority, despite repeated intentions and resolutions on the part of library administrators and the Joint Powers Board to rectify this inequity.
In addition, Felton Library Friends considers it unrealistic to think that the system will “be expanded again as future revenues increase,” which presumably might include reopening branches that had been closed. Once a branch is closed, it will almost certainly be closed forever. For this reason, Felton Library Friends holds that the closure of any branch must be considered only as a last resort, and only after all possible scenarios for financial sustainability have been extensively explored.
The Felton Library Friends steering committee comprises more than a dozen people who advocate for a new library in Felton. Paul Machlis is one of the group’s founding members and spokesman. For information: www.feltonlibraryfriends.org.