One Year Later: Private Management in Riverside Co., CA

Staff -- School Library Journal, 7/1/1998

When California's Riverside County announced it was hiring a private company to run its library system, Caryn Lanka was among the skeptical. "I'm philosophically opposed to private contracting when it comes to libraries," said Lanka, a volunteer at the Desert Hot Springs branch and President of the Desert Friends, a Friends of the Library umbrella group.

Yet despite her misgivings, Lanka had to admit she'd seen some concrete improvements since LSSI (Library Systems and Services, Inc. of Germantown, Maryland) took over running the sprawling Riverside County Library System a year ago this month. Her Desert Hot Springs branch went from having one paid employee to four: a librarian, an aide, and two pages. And the small library will now be open eight more hours a week, up from 20 to 28.

Across the country, many librarians share Lanka's philosophical concerns about privately run libraries. And they're watching closely what happens in Riverside County, the nation's first library system to hand over its entire operation to a private company.

LSSI so far gets mainly good reviews in Riverside, a sprawling county southeast of Los Angeles. Customers and government officials point to increased hours, more staff, and even a slight rise in the materials budget, which had been virtually nonexistent.

But it's far too soon to hold up Riverside as proof that privatization works. The fact is that LSSI took over a library system so plagued with problems that it had nowhere to go but up.

For all its gains, Riverside County's library budget is still a paltry $7 per capita--near the bottom both in California and the United States.The materials budget remains breathtakingly low--$180,000 for a system that last year served 875,000 people in 25 branches. Even Riverside's extended library hours are merely an improvement over hours so curtailed that many branches were once barely open at all.

As for youth services, the library last year had only seven children's librarians to serve a county the geographic size of New Jersey.Asked about increasing the materials budget, Bob Buster of the county Board of Supervisors said of LSSI, "I think it's going to be difficult for them to substantially improve that. We're going to have to put more revenues in the system or find some new tax source."

Before LSSI, Riverside County libraries were operated by the city of Riverside. Long-standing problems came to a head starting in 1993, when the state of California diverted property tax money that had gone to public libraries into schools. County library spending dropped from roughly $10 million to $6 million. The materials budget, some $1.2 million in 1990, fell to $33,000 by 1995. Hours were cut, collections dwindled, and staff were laid off. Citizen anger over the libraries led the county and city to part ways. In June of last year, the county hired LSSI. The company agreed to keep all county library employees at their current salaries. Most stayed on. It also agreed to add hours, hire more staff, and spend more on materials.

There's general agreement that LSSI has met its goals. "Everything we were told ahead of time was honest and above board and [happened] the way it was promised," said Barbara Bowie, a librarian who worked in the system before LSSI and now manages what's called the Desert Zone, made up of nine libraries.

Bowie points, for instance, to how the company increased staffing, particularly aides, freeing librarians from duties like reshelving books.Besides her role as zone manager, Bowie also oversees the system's children's services. The library does not have a full-time youth services coordinator, which County Librarian Gary Christmas attributes to a lack of resources and a "desire to get staffing to the front line" rather than administration. Instead, Bowie, a former school librarian, heads a "youth services team," consisting of herself and the seven children's librarians who work in the county's large libraries. Each member also works with staff at three or four smaller libraries.

Asked if youth services had improved under LSSI, Bowie said they were "certainly equal" to the last few years, though youth librarians are "spread thin." Her staff is working to bolster services by pursuing grants and "sharing ideas and enthusiasm," Bowie said.

The good feeling extends to customers and politicians in many of the sites LSSI serves, some of which had been threatening to secede from the county system before the company came in. Two cities did leave, though they say it reflected not LSSI but a longstanding desire for local control.

Still, there's a continuing threat that more cities will secede. Calimesa residents, for instance, remain unhappy with their library and haven't ruled out leaving the system, said Faith Scarite, the city's Director of Community Services.

The main job of answering gripes falls to Christmas, who sets broad library policy and makes sure LSSI meets its contract. With money tight, Christmas said he can't solve all problems but thinks the contract with LSSI has made the system more responsive to its constituents. The fundamental change, he said, is not that Riverside county hired a private company to run its libraries, but that after years of handing money to the city of Riverside and essentially closing its eyes, the county "took back control"of its libraries.

"The county is very cognizant that this is a unique arrangement," Christmas said. "We're not about to cede any policy decisions" to LSSI.It's no accident that Riverside officials emphasize who's in charge. They know they face a lot of skepticism based on the bad feelings engendered in Hawaii, where Baker & Taylor, the book wholesaler, took over materials selection for the state library system. "Hawaii has created a lot of heartache for us," said Frank Pezzanite, LSSI's Chief Operating Officer. "We don't go anywhere that it doesn't come up in conversation."

Even Pezzanite says there's only so much that can be done with Riverside's limited funds. Barring more tax dollars, he said the company is seeking other funding sources, by creating a library foundation, for instance.

The county, for its part, managed to add $60,000 more to next year's materials budget, an increase written into LSSI's new one-year contract. But significant new county revenues are nowhere in sight, and this year's budget of $6.3 million won't rise in fiscal 1999. Asked if he'd managed to squeeze out a profit in Riverside, Pezzanite was frank. "To say we've made money would probably not be telling the truth," he said. But he said that as a private company, LSSI is not under intense pressure to show profits and envisions small profit margins from running libraries.

Though Pezzanite said the company isn't yet certain if its new venture makes sense, LSSI has been aggressively courting other library systems. This month, it will take over the library in Calabasas, California, which seceded from the County of Los Angeles Public Library. It's also been talking to officials in places such as Jersey City, New Jersey, and Atherton, California, about running their libraries. The company even bid, unsuccessfully, for the contract in Moreno Valley, a library that left Riverside County.

However much Pezzanite plays down profits, the folks in Riverside County seem clear-eyed about the fact that they're dealing with a business. They believe LSSI needs to make them a showcase for possible new contracts. At the same time, Supervisor Buster worries what will happen if LSSI doesn't succeed in signing new contracts. Would the company lose its incentive to maintain standards, or would it simply end its contract with Riverside? "At some point," he said, "you have to deal with the fact that the public sector doesn't have to make a profit. If they can't get enough contracts, then that may leave Riverside in the lurch."--A.G.