Thursday, December 10, 2009

Select Wright Library supporters approach Ventura County Grand Jury

Although many misconceptions were clarified about the facility’s funding, those advocating reopening the historic library want jurors to investigate claims

By Paul Sisolak 12/10/2009

After a sit-in last week failed to reverse the impending closure of Ventura’s struggling H.P. Wright Library, a devoted group of residents are now taking their cause to the Grand Jury.

Claiming, among other allegations, that city officials shut down the beloved library though they had enough funds to keep it open, at least a dozen complaints have already been submitted to the Ventura County Grand Jury, according to Maili Halme Brocke.

Brocke, a Ventura resident, is leading the campaign and wants the Grand Jury to head an investigation into Ventura City Hall. Brocke says several people involved with crafting the city’s budget deliberately withheld information proving that there was enough surplus money to keep the library open for business. The Wright was closed on Nov. 30.

“There’s a whole lot of wrongdoing because of a web of lies,” Brocke says.

In her own jury filing, Brocke lists no less than nine issues she hopes jurors will examine. Among them, she charges that city staff falsified public documents, omitted key information from budget talks, and violated the public meetings

Brown Act so that it would appear there wasn’t the funding necessary to keep the library open.

Most notable in her argument is the discovery of numbers Brocke maintains she found in the hidden cells of an Excel spreadsheet downloaded from the City of Ventura’s Web site. Those statistics, she said, revealed that the city has about $683,436 in surplus money for the Wright Library; only $650,000, according to Brocke in a letter to the editor last month, is needed to run the building.

According to Jackie Griffin, the county’s libraries director, as of this month, it costs about $280,000 to operate Wright Library, including a total of eight full- and part-time employees.

Brocke’s biggest point of contention is that the available surplus funds are gained from a wealth of property taxes collected from the eastern end of Ventura, where the library is located near Ventura College. That money — more than $1.2 million in tax gains — was available for use, yet city officials, she says, asserted throughout the current fiscal year that funding for the Wright, the smallest of Ventura’s libraries, had run out.

Brocke names five people that she’d like the Grand Jury to investigate, including Griffin and newly appointed Ventura Mayor Bill Fulton.

She says Fulton, who represents Ventura on the county’s Library Services Commission, was in the wrong for being one of several City Council members to ask residents to vote for Measure A, even though revenues from the proposed half-percent sales tax measure could not legally be devoted to saving the library.

It was hoped that the ballot measure alone, which failed at the polls last month, would draw in an estimated $500,000 annually alone for the library, a last-ditch effort at saving the building financially.

However, that portion of Brocke’s claim conflicts with Measure A, which was endorsed by the Reporter, as the measure was presented as a general tax, which means that the initiative could not promise to pay for specific things, only suggest.

“It’s not illegal,” Fulton said this week. “It was up to the voters if they believed us or not. We made it pretty clear why we made the measure to be four years long: to coincide with the (four-year) terms of the council members.”

According to Griffin, 85 percent of Ventura’s libraries’ funding comes from property taxes; this past year, that amounted to $2 million divided across all of Ventura and its libraries, including Wright, based on priorities like hours of operation. Property tax monies raised in the area near Wright, for example, are not devoted strictly to that library.

“You can argue that Wright better serves East Ventura and the majority (of property taxes) should be given to Wright, but there is no separate service area,” Fulton said.

Fulton had most recently defended Griffin against other allegations by Brocke, in a letter published last week in the Reporter. Griffin said the closure of the Wright was inevitable; the library, she said, had been in trouble for a long time.

“It’s really the truth,” she says. “Fifteen years the library has been rescued in one way or another. It’s just a terrible economic time that we couldn’t save it one way or another. This is an economic situation that is just untenable.”

Griffin continued, “I think it’s really wonderful people care so much for their libraries. I’d rather have them be upset about it than not care. There’s also a need to personalize things — that there’s some person or entity causing this thing — rather than realize the Wright Library has been in trouble since 1993.”

State financial support for libraries in California has diminished greatly. According to Berta Steele, vice president of the Friends of the San Buenaventura Library group, in 2001 the Ventura County library system received more than $1 million in state funding. Compare that to 2009, when it received a fraction of the money at just $149,000.

During the Measure A campaign, the Friends embarked on a final fundraising campaign led by Steele to save the Wright, raising $120,000.

“We were able to keep the library open through November,” she said. “That was five months we bought.”

The Friends’ efforts to save the Wright also meant that other funds, for new book purchases and the like for Ventura’s two other libraries — E.P. Foster and Avenue — were diverted.

“We neglected all of the Ventura libraries in our efforts to keep Wright open,” said Friends President Will Thompson.
When Measure A went to ballots last month, some members of the Friends of the Library did not vote for it, he said.
Although the Wright Library is closed, the building and its books inside won’t be going anywhere. Fulton said the city, which owns the building, will continue to hold a lease on the property, owned by Ventura College, until 2015. During that time, the library could be used for storage of equipment and books.

Thompson hopes that within the next five years a special, more specific parcel tax could be implemented to help reopen the Wright. A $15 tax imposed on owners of 34,000 parcels in the city of Ventura, he said, could raise more than $500,000.

According to Mayor Fulton, in 1995 city officials placed a special parcel tax to benefit libraries on ballots. The tax, estimated to raise $1 million a year at $35 a parcel, needed a two-thirds vote. It failed with Ventura voters, receiving only 53 percent.

Steele said she is happy that Brocke’s campaign so zealously supports the future of libraries in Ventura. But the Friends of the Library, she noted, does not agree with the Grand Jury appeal, and takes no stance in the matter.

“I wish them the best. I certainly would like to see the library open,” Steele said. “I, however, don’t agree with the tactics and the smear campaign or blaming the messenger. I don’t agree with insinuations without factual backup. I don’t agree with attacks on people who are trying their darnedest to keep things working, with a diminishing amount of money. We tried, we did our best.”

It was unknown by deadline if the Grand Jury would be taking Brocke’s requests into consideration. Robert Denton, an assistant district attorney for Ventura County, explained that it’s rarely divulged what grand jurors are investigating until after their results are released publicly.

Brocke told the Reporter in an e-mail from last month that two people — one, a parent from Ojai — asked her to help organize the effort to save the Wright. She’s since set up an e-mail account, libraryjustice@yahoo.com, where people interested in the Wright campaign can write for information.

“I personally don’t even use Wright. I use Oxnard and Camarillo (libraries),” she said. “It’s odd that I’m the crusader behind Wright when I don’t even use it. It’s just that I don’t like people being misled and want to know the truth of what’s happening.”

paul@vcreporter.com


http://www.vcreporter.com/cms/story/detail/select_wright_library_supporters_approach_grand_jury/7472/

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