Forwarded by request. Laurie Laurie Mahaffey, Deputy Director Central Texas Library System, Inc. 1005 West 41st Street Austin, Texas 78756 www.ctls.net [email protected] 512-583-0704 x18 800-262-4431 x18
Subject: Richardson: library is latest to charge nonresidents for checkouts Richardson library is latest to charge nonresidents for checkouts 10:40 PM CDT on Friday, October 23, 2009 By IAN McCANN / The Dallas Morning News [email protected] Headed to the Richardson Public Library to find your next good read? If you're a Dallas resident, be ready to pay a hefty fee. Nearly a fifth of the library's 46,742 users were coming from Dallas - a number that Richardson officials feared would skyrocket after Dallas cut library hours during a budget crisis over the summer. So, as of Oct. 1, Richardson adopted a reciprocal policy: If your city makes Richardson residents pay to check out books, Richardson will charge you the same amount. The new rule affects residents of Dallas and Highland Park. "You face economic realities," Richardson library director Steve Benson said. "We were so stretched trying to serve everybody." Dallas charges nonresidents $250 per year for unlimited use of its library system, so residents there must now pay that amount for a Richardson card, which lets people check out materials and use computers. Highland Park residents will be charged $150 per year. Some effects are already being felt at the Richardson library, located at the civic complex near Arapaho Road and Central Expressway. There are no more waiting lists for computers, and lines at the checkout desk are far shorter. Just 10 Dallas residents have paid the fee, and about 160 others have received waivers for volunteering at the library or for being Richardson school district students, teachers or librarians. For cities' librarians, the question of whether to charge people to borrow books is a difficult one. Ideally, there would be free access to reading and educational materials. But in the real world of budgets and managing limited resources, that's not always possible. "I hated doing it, but I felt that it had to be done," said Kathleen Edwards, library director in Coppell, which instituted fees two years ago. "My goal is to put quality library services in everyone's hands." The cities with fees implemented them to recoup the cost of providing service to people who didn't pay taxes to support the libraries. Also, outsiders were diminishing the quality of service to residents by straining capacity. "It got to the point that all we could do was issue library cards and check out materials and check in materials," Highland Park library director Bonnie Case said. "Some people thought it was an excellent value, and some didn't." In Highland Park, more than 50 percent of users were nonresidents before the fee was instituted some decades ago. Today, there are about 1,500 resident library cards and 150 nonresident ones. Coppell uses a "reciprocal and comparable" system to determine who must pay a fee. Visitors whose home cities charge Coppell residents must pay $40 a year. They also pay if Coppell determines that their cities' per-capita funding is below Coppell's. The arguments that suburbs are making for charging fees are precisely the ones made when Dallas implemented nonresident fees in 1976: People were using services without paying for them with property taxes. That's an argument many can accept. But a $250 fee seems too steep to some. "I was shocked," Dallas resident and longtime Richardson library user Stefani Blackman said. "We were willing to pay $250 if it was a one-time fee, not an annual one." She said her family uses the Richardson library because it is close to home and because the children's section is far better than the one at the Fretz Park Branch, the Dallas library closest to her. There are other options for people besides paying fees. Anybody can go to his or her hometown library to get a TexShare card, which offers some borrowing privileges at city and university libraries throughout the state. And people can still read or study at the libraries at no cost. Laurie Evans, Dallas' library director, said few people from outside Dallas actually pay. Just 66 punch cards were sold in the past year, most at the five-books-for-$25 level. Nearly all of the $250 unlimited cards went to Addison, which bought 330 for its residents. "Anybody can get a TexShare card," she said. "We give people so many ways to use us." MAKING VISITORS PAY A handful of Dallas-area cities charge nonresidents to use their libraries, with the goal of recouping the cost of serving people who do not pay local taxes. COPPELL * Charges $40 per year, roughly equivalent to the property taxes that residents pay to run the library. * The fee, instituted two years ago, is paid by nonresidents whose cities either charge Coppell residents for library use or fund their libraries at lower levels than Coppell. DALLAS * Since 1976 has let nonresidents buy punch cards to check out materials. Levels range from $25 for five books to $250 a year for unlimited use of the library. HIGHLAND PARK * Started charging nonresidents more than 20 years ago. * The current fee, $150 per year, has been in place since 2000. RICHARDSON * Put its system in place Oct. 1. * A nonresident is charged the same amount that a Richardson resident would pay in that person's city. * Exceptions are granted to library volunteers; children who live in the Richardson school district; people who attend any school, including a college, within the school district boundaries; and any teacher or librarian from a school within the Richardson school district's boundaries.
