Los Altos Library To Charge Palo Altans $80 Starting July 1

In response to dramatic reductions in state funding and an increasing demand for library services, the Santa Clara County Library District Joint Powers Authority approved an $80 annual library card fee for nonresidents of the district, effective July 1. Los Altos is part of this district; Palo Alto and Mountain View are not.

Since 1988, the state has reimbursed public libraries for lending materials to nonresidents of their districts, and any resident of California could get a card at any public library in the state. The district lends far more books to nonresidents than district residents borrow from other libraries. At one time, the district received over $2 million annually to partially reimburse the cost of this service. Most of that will be eliminated from the proposed budget.

The governor’s newly proposed budget eliminates half of the $30.4 million normally funded for The Public Library Foundation, the California Literacy Program and the Transaction Based Reimbursement, a cooperative system of borrowing and loaning books that has existed statewide for decades. Originally, all $32.4 million was eliminated. 

I spoke to Melinda Cervantes, county library director, and asked if restoration of $15.2 million for libraries would change the decision to charge non-district residents for library cards, and she said no.

Of the 356,107 Santa Clara County Library District cardholders, 202,559 are residents of the district, and 153,548, or 43 percent, do not live in the library district, which includes Campbell, Cupertino, Gilroy, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Milpitas, Monte Sereno, Morgan Hill, Saratoga and unincorporated areas of Santa Clara County. The district expects that only 2-3 percent of nonresidents, less than 4,500, will pay $80 for the card.

The county library tax is $250 per household, including a special property tax of $34. In Los Altos and Los Altos Hills, the property tax is $76, which is $42 more than the rest of the county. 

In Palo Alto, we pay $98 per year per capita for library services. With an average of 2.6 people in every home, we pay $254 per year per household from the general fund, which includes the obvious property and sales taxes but also transient occupancy tax and utility user tax. Palo Alto has relatively few—983—district card holders. Mountain View has 9,594, Menlo Park 711 and Redwood City 497.

I suspect most of the Menlo Park and Redwood City users work in or very near Santa Clara County library district cities. Since 39,000 Palo Altans have library cards, only 2.5 percent of them also use county libraries, primarily Los Altos. Once the fee goes into effect, that should drop to less than 30,000. While Los Altos will be dropped by almost all of us, we still can take out books free from Mountain View and Menlo Park libraries.