The Gilroy Library is open less than any other branch in the Santa Clara County Library District, and while there’s currently no funding to increase hours, district officials say they are open to brainstorming ideas with the City of Gilroy on how to increase the building’s availability to the public.
“There’s no question, I’d like to see Gilroy open more,” said County Librarian Nancy Howe. “We need to look at either how we can increase revenue, or how to find more cost effective ways to be open.”
The Gilroy library is open five days a week, Tuesday through Saturday, with evening hours on weeknights and a more traditional 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. schedule Fridays and Saturdays for a total of 46 hours a week. In comparison, Morgan Hill is open 49 hours a week (including three hours of limited lobby opening); while Campbell offers 51 weekly open hours; Saratoga, 52; Milpitas, 54; and Cupertino and Los Altos tie for having the most open hours with 66 per week.
Morgan Hill and Gilroy are closed on Sundays and Mondays. They are the only two branches in the district that are closed two days per week.
Christine Maxwell, Gilroy mother of two, said that many times her family wishes the library was open on Sunday.
“Sunday is family day for us, and we would love to walk to the library from our home and maybe picnic afterwards,” she said.
Maxwell’s 8-year-old daughter Mackenna is obsessed with reading, and makes a beeline to the “Nancy Drew” series at every library visit. Maxwell also packs her SUV full of kids on a regular basis and drives them over to the library for family movie showings.
“For us, being able to go on a Sunday would be a really great thing,” she said.
Gilroy Librarian Lani Yoshimura said through consistent surveys administered throughout the years, both formal and informal, she believes for the most part, people are happy with the Gilroy’s current schedule.
“Of course, some would like more hours,” she said. “Some would like us open 24 hours a day.”
Yoshimura said that out of the library’s two closed days – Sundays and Mondays – Mondays are in higher demand.
The issue with expanding hours for the two-story Gilroy library is it’s gigantic size, Yoshimura said of the sparkling new facility on Sixth Street, formerly located downtown on Monterey Street.
“I guess really what we’ve got is a big building, a 54,000-square-foot building when before we were in a 12,000-square-foot building, and we have the same staff as before. Not only for service aspects but for public safety and other reasons we need a considerable amount of staff to run the building,” she said. “Getting the funding for it would be the hardest part.”
Howe said the district has provided the most hours they can right now for Gilroy, based on the three-part system they use to dole out funds from county property taxes.
Money for staffing generated from county property taxes goes into a communal district pool and is spread throughout the district’s seven branches according to a three-part formula that factors in the branch’s circulation numbers as well as property values and population of community.
Because Gilroy has lower circulation, property values and a lower population than other areas of the county, they get a little less of the pie.
But Gilroy’s circulation has risen by 30 percent in the last few years, due to population growth and the unveiling of the new state-of-the-art library facility in 2012. Howe thinks this could eventually lead to more staff for extended open hours.
But right now, the district is busy rolling out a campaign to renew the special library tax – which has been in place for 20 years and is expiring in 2015 – just to maintain current library hours, not increase them.
As libraries have faced erosion, and eventually the elimination of state funding, Deputy County Librarian Derek Wolfgram said the district is asking county residents to continue to pay the same $33 a year on their property taxes they’ve paid for the last two decades, bringing in $5.6 million annually for county libraries – about 18 percent of the library system’s total budget. The ballots will be mailed in August and the measure needs a two-thirds vote to pass.
Wolfgram is skeptical on the chances of this, noting “we didn’t think the voter climate would support an increase right now.”
If the ballot were to fail, library hours within the county would be reduced by a day or a day-and-a-half, Wolfgram said.
Wolfgram pointed to other communities in the district that have increased their open hours without additional funding from the district. The Cupertino and Los Altos libraries are funded for 54 hours a week by the district, but pay about $350,000 annually to the district to provide 12 extra open hours per week to their patrons. Several years ago, Saratoga’s Friends of the Library group also “bought” extra hours for their branch. In Campbell, residents asked that their 51 open hours be spread evenly so their library could be open six days a week.
By the end of this year, the district hopes to increase the Morgan Hill library’s hours to a Monday through Saturday schedule. Although Morgan Hill receives the least funding of all seven district libraries, they are next in line to receive an expanse in library hours because their building is smaller and more inexpensive to staff than Gilroy’s.
Right now it costs the district $1,577,060 to keep staff at Morgan Hill’s facilities for 46 full hours and three limited lobby hours, $88,421 less than Gilroy’s 46-hour-a-week schedule.
“When the Gilroy building quadrupled in size, there wasn’t any mechanism to increase staffing,” Wolfgram said.
Forty-seven percent, or $15.5 million, of the district’s $33 million budget goes to staffing libraries.
Mayor Don Gage said although the library is a “high priority,” sales tax revenue has to go up more before the City can think about buying extra library hours from the district.
Councilman Dion Bracco, who also sits on the library district’s Joint Powers Authority board, said right now he is just focused on maintaining – not adding to – Gilroy’s current schedule.
“If the bond measure doesn’t go through, we’ll see drastic cuts in the library. I’d love to see it open on Monday, but it’s all about the money,” Bracco said.
