Would You Pay $80 for a Library Card?

County residents in WA protest excessive library fees; petition for levy on upcoming ballot

By Alex Sinclair -- School Library Journal, 11/1/2004

Imagine paying as much as $80 to use each library in town? That's what Mickey Bambrick forks over for library books at the Mount Vernon City Library to homeschool her five-year old son, Kaleb. Since the city libraries in Skagit County, WA, are not state funded they are forced to charge rural residents an annual fee to use library services.

"If I join all six city libraries, I'd have to pay almost $400 a year," Bambrick explains. That's why she's joined Skagit Libraries for All, a group of rural residents who are petitioning to include a measure on an upcoming February ballot that would create one library district with one card for all county users—city and rural residents alike. The initiative proposes to levy a tax on nonresident library users based on the assessed value of their homes and could generate $1.7 million. Half of Skagit's 37,000 rural homeowners have school-age children who would benefit from the move.

"I see this as a win-win situation," says Mindy Cosler, associate dean for library media services at the Skagit Valley Community College who is also secretary of the Skagit Libraries for All. "Our goal is to set up a cooperative arrangement that would create a countywide infrastructure and allow all libraries in the county to share cataloging."

So far, residents have raised the necessary 2,500 signatures required to put the measure on the February ballot. Efforts to pass the initiative were defeated twice by local fire departments who were concerned that it would cut into their own budgets. Skagit's county assessor, however, recently said that the levy would have no impact on the local fire district's budget.