The three-branch Santa Clarita (Calif.) Public Library opened its doors over the Fourth of July weekend as an independent city system for the first time since city officials voted in August 2010 to depart from the County of Los Angeles Public Library. By all accounts, hundreds flocked to the openings to check out materials, eyeball the expanded Canyon County branch, and size up their libraries’ new staffs—employees not of the city of Santa Clarita but of contract-services firm Library Systems and Services, Inc. (LSSI), whose five-year, $19-million contract to manage the nascent system was the focus of almost a year’s worth of debate and litigation in the southern California community.
“We’re taking a pretty good system and making it better,” SCPL Director Ed Kieczykowski said in the June 26 Santa Clarita Valley Signal. The libraries reopened with more than $900,000 worth of new materials, according to press reports. “We are looking forward to a fantastic library experience for all of our patrons,” Santa Clarita Mayor Marsha McLean told American Libraries.
It wasn’t the first time that LSSI faced controversy as a governing authority< weighed whether to retain the firm’s services, and it probably won’t be the last either. Nonetheless, LSSI presently provides management services for 16 public library systems nationally, including four in California—Camarillo Public Library, Moorpark City Library, Shasta Public Libraries, and the Riverside County Library System—and is in talks with several cash-starved boroughs in Britain, according to media reports at the Don’t Privatise Libraries blog.
In February, the San Joaquin County (Calif.) Commission decided against contracting out management of the Stockton–San Joaquin Public Library to LSSI despite County Administrator Manuel Lopez’s favorable report about the firm’s commitment to delivering longer service hours, an increased fund balance, and a larger acquisitions budget. The primary driver in the decision-making process was public opinion,” library Director Chris Freeman told AL. The Friends of the Stockton Library and the Concerned Citizens Coalition of Stockton began raising concerns over losing local control of the library as soon as word of the negotiations with LSSI became public in fall 2010; community members collected signatures opposing privatization and wrote newspaper opinion pieces and letters to the editor expressing their disapproval.
In Rockwall County, Texas, officials abandoned the option of privatizing the management of the Rockwall County Public Library two weeks after the public began objecting, the Rockwall Herald-Banner reported June 17.
The outcome was quite different in Santa Clarita, of course, despite similar opposition, which went so far as area residents filing two lawsuits, both of which were dismissed (one charging that outsourcing would violate California’s library confidentiality law and the other that private contracting was illegal under the state education code). Skeptics continue to charge that city officials pressed on behind closed doors despite public sentiment, among them Santa Clarita residents Lori Rivas and Lori Christian, who traveled to New Orleans to air their concerns at a program entitled “Privatization of Libraries: What’s at Stake for Your Profession and Community.”
Refuting the skeptics, Mayor McLean cites an FY2011–2014 strategic service plan for the library that was approved July 12 by the City Council after six months of work by a 37-member Citizens Public Library Advisory Committee. “Santa Clarita is a contract city,” Mayor McLean said, explaining that it also outsources services for sheriffs, transit, and trash. “We’ve had excellent results with these contracts and our residents receive top-notch service at the best price.”
Attributing the city’s fiscal health to “this prudent approach to service provision,” she went on to say, “We determined, after extensive research and due diligence, that contracting for day-to-day services with a professional library management company made sense.”
“But make no mistake,” Mayor McLean added. “Our library board of directors is the City Council and we are the ultimate decision makers for our libraries.”
Checklists and balances
Mayor McLean’s sentiments about public accountability are echoed in a new toolkit from ALA’s Office for Library Advocacy. However, “Keeping Public Libraries Public: A Checklist for Communities Considering Privatization of Public Libraries” makes no bones about ALA’s opposition to library privatization.
The 12-page report draws a distinction between outsourcing (in which “the contract is typically narrow and for a specific service that can be easily defined and monitored”) and privatization, which, the report states, “encompasses all library services and controls not only how services are delivered but what services are offered and delivered.”
That distinction has also captured the interest of the California legislature, where a bill is being considered that would regulate under what circumstances the management of a library that is withdrawing from a free county library system could be privatized. AB 438 was sponsored by Assemblyman Das Williams (D-Santa Barbara), whose district includes Ventura, where privatization is on the table; the city council there voted in April to remove its two city libraries from the Ventura County Library and has hired a consultant who has until the fall to make recommendations about its governance, according to the June 20 Ventura County Star.
The bill, which passed the Assembly in June and cleared the state Senate Governance and Finance Committee July 6, would limit the length of a private-service contract to two years and require such transparency as “publishing notice of the contemplated action in a specified manner [and] clearly demonstrating that the contract will result in overall cost savings to the city or library district.” If enacted, AB 438 would affect the conditions for renewal of LSSI’s California contracts, including the one with Riverside County, which in 1997 became the first to outsource its library operations to the firm.
Those lobbying against the bill include the League of California Cities and LSSI. “I think there’s a lot of concern among certain parties that what we offer is going to start to become very attractive,” Mark Smith, LSSI’s vice president for West Coast operations, said in the June 1 Riverside Press-Enterprise.
