An ALA report released in June urges communities to thoroughly vet privatization proposals and provides a checklist for doing so. “We get reports all the time of companies calling up city leaders and saying ‘we can save your library,’” says Patricia Tumulty, chair of the ALA’s task force on privatization. “Well, how? Are we actually looking at the same hours of service? There’s a different standard of transparency and accountability between a public library and a private organization.”
In many cases, public library systems that get taken over by LSSI are in truly bad shape. Jackson County, Oregon, had had all 15 library branches shuttered for six months because of budget cuts until the contract to manage them was awarded to LSSI in 2007.
But Santa Clarita is a different story. The libraries there weren’t in imminent danger of dramatic cuts to services and programs. There, LSSI convinced the local government that money was being wasted on overhead that could go to expanding the collections. So the three county libraries reopened to the public on July 1 under LSSI management. Centralizing and automating administrative and back-office functions can free up library staff to focus on interacting with library patrons, King says.
Legislative action
Santa Clarita resident Michael Wilkerson wasn’t impressed on his first library visit after the change in management. “They don’t seem to know what they’re doing,” Wilkerson says. “They were very scripted, ‘Oh look, you want a library card? We have six different colors.’’’ Wilkerson is worried that the community feel of the library will disappear. He expects the company to cut corners on services and programs in order to make a profit and was outraged that the city council acted on the deal without more analysis or active pursuit of community input.
Local uproar over the move and the way that it was handled by the city council is fast-tracking a bill in the California Assembly that would make it harder for other cities to take the same tack. The legislation as originally conceived would have required a public vote before libraries could go private.
Now, a milder version lays out a series of due-diligence steps a community must take before outsourcing library services, including detailed financial analysis and increased public notice. The Assembly passed the bill in June and a Senate floor vote is expected in August. “All of the things that LSSI or another company promises to the public for cost savings should have proof,” the bill’s author, Assemblyman Das Williams, said in a heated hearing of the Senate Governance & Finance Committee on July 6. “And it should be proof that is presented to the public in a public meeting with adequate notice. That’s what I view as the core of this bill.”
The League of California Cities doesn’t consider this approach a step forward. The League argues that the bill effectively would take the outsourcing option off the table for many communities, forcing them to resort to branch closures and shortened hours of operation. “The practical impact of this bill is to simply ban a city from contracting out library services,” said Kyra Ross, legislative representative at the League of California Cities.
The legislation also is being pushed aggressively by the Service Employees International Union, which represents many public library workers. In a union online video campaign, a claymation “Privatization Beast” wearing a tie tramples through a nameless downtown and gobbles up a library while a narrator warns of the potential impact: “Libraries, though tiny and defenseless, are plentiful. Enzymes in the behemoth’s esophagus immediately begin to break down the library, forcing it to charge a fee for services that were formerly free, such as patent research… and books.”
Brad King of LSSI says such claims are groundless. “That’s the most maddening thing that we deal with,” he complains. “We’ve never charged a fee to the public for a service at all, ever.”
— Contact Melissa Maynard at mmaynard@stateline.org
Image: Fargo, ND Library's Childrens Room. Courtesy Fargo Library
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