Board of Library Trustees - Regular Meeting

I'd like to call this September 14th meeting of the Benicia Board of Library Trustees to order. May I have the roll call, please, Lois?

Trustee, excuse me, Vice President Carolyn Cataloni is absent. Trustee Lois Kazakov is here. Trustee Linda Ordonio-Dixon is absent. Trustee Ruth Workman?

Here.

President Todd Hickey?

Here. Next, the fundamental or reference to the fundamental rights of the public. A plaque stating the fundamental rights of each member of the public is posted at the entrance to this meeting room per section 4.04.030 of the City of Benicia's open governance, government, excuse me, ordinance. Adoption of the agenda. May I have a motion to adopt the agenda as written?

I move to adopt the agenda as written.

I'll second it.

Hold on. Aye. This is a small group. Ruth Workman.

Aye.

Todd Hickey.

Aye. Opportunity for public comments. Is there any public comment that we receive written comments? Anyone online? OK. And I assume that the folks here are for the presentation. Correct me if I'm wrong. All right. Since there seems to be no comment, let's move on to the information presentations. First, by the Friends of the Library.

Hello, my name is Darryl. I am the newly elected president of the Friends of the Library, which means I know the least of anybody that could have come from the Friends of the Library board, but that's okay. We'll stumble forward here with grace and love. So just kind of a recap of the Friends of the Library as I know it. They were started in, I want to say 1984, if not even a little sooner than that. And they have been a part of Benicia Public Library ever since. And they really strive to do what we can to send as much money and support to the library for be it material, books, or programs, or anything else. We do that twice a month by holding donations where we take in gently used books and other items. And then once a month we have a public sale which is usually an all-day Saturday event, and then we also do memberships for a small fee, and then before those public sales, the members can come through and purchase books. And that's kind of it. For the most part, we take as much as we can. We do have some restrictions on making sure that the books are still in good use, the binding's not broken and stuff, so we keep those around for a while, and certainly through a couple of sales and If they don't get sold, then we try to move them on to other agencies that can use them. That's it in a nutshell. I think I was under my three minutes. Questions? Comments? Concerns? Anything else I can answer?

I have a question. Absolutely. What's the membership?

Membership. What is membership? So in order to just make a little extra income for the library, we sell memberships. And so if anyone were interested in the membership, you can purchase it for a year or two years or for a family. Not that much, 20 bucks or something like that. But it just gets you that early access to any of the book sales.

Do you know the total number of the members right now?

I don't know the exact number off the top of my head, but I could easily get that for you if you'd like it. That's a great question. Anybody else have a great question?

I'm always... Kind of trying to figure out where the friends are going to be 10 years from now. Because people buy digital books now. So your material that you're trying to sell is going to diminish as time goes on. Are the friends giving any thought to that?

Um, I have, I have yet to, we, so we do quarterly council meetings and the last meeting we had, I was elected along with another lady for vice president. So we've not, I've not stepped into that conversation. I think certainly the world is changing. Ebooks are becoming a thing, but I think a lot of people who love books love the tactile feel of a book. Uh, and I think, um, When we get to that stage where we need to move away from the tactile books that people want to hold and read, we can cross that bridge. But I don't foresee that people won't still want to come into a low-priced, low bookstore to get the books that they want and to hold and to smell and read for themselves.

Final question. Sort of thinking on the other sort of side of the spectrum, not the cheap books, but the expensive books. Do you, I know I've seen various friends groups, for instance, use eBay to sell higher value items. Does that happen here or?

Yeah, it is. Great question. So there is a small section downstairs of the library that we have a gentleman who volunteers his time to sell off books that he thinks may go for a higher value than we sell. So the books that we sell, most of them are about a dollar. We do have what we call a premium section, which is anywhere from like $2 to $4. And that's really about as high as it goes, unless it's like a complete set of something. And those books do get listed on eBay, and every month we usually sell a couple. And those books, you know, can sell for $20, $40, $50, $60, $100 or something like that. And so there is a little bit of a fund that comes through every month through eBay, through that site. You know, I didn't mention this before, but... For the last several years, if not even more than that, we are donating about $60,000 a year to the public library, which we're quite excited about for that. I could stick around for one more question. If you would like, let me know. We're good. Thank you very much. You too.

Now we have our Venetia Library Foundation.

Do we know how to get this? Oh, great.

It's showing everywhere, I think.

It's showing everywhere. All right, so we push, we advance the slides from here, I presume. Okay. Good evening to the Library Board of Trustees. In front of you, you have a variety of members from the Library Foundation Board. And I am Sharon Mayer. I am the current chair. Thank you for giving us a few minutes to share what's been happening with the Venetia Library Foundation over the last year. We're happy to have an annual check-in with you and a chance to stay connected. So we want to focus on four things in our short discussion tonight. One is who we are. what is changing, where we're headed, and how we hope to work with you. The foundation is entering a new chapter and it's an important moment for the library as well. Now before I talk about the foundation, I want to start with why we're here, the library. For so many people in Benicia, our library is much more than a place to check out a book, as you learn from the friends as well. a place where children fall in love with reading, where teens find a place to belong, where families can learn together, and where seniors can find resources and connections. The library is really a community living room, a place where everyone belongs. That's what we're investing in, not simply a building, but a place that makes Benicia feel like Benicia. So where does the foundation fit in this? We're a 501c3. We were established in 2005 to bring private charitable support to the library, particularly for capital improvements and enhancements. We have a distinct role. We're not the library. We're not the friends. We're not the city. We have building philanthropic resources, or we help to build philanthropic resources for the library's physical structure. keeping it accessible, welcoming, modern, and ready to evolve as Benicia involves. We exist, in essence, to help make sure today's library is ready for tomorrow. So our story has changed, too. Over the last two years, we've been doing some rebuilding, not of the library yet, but of the foundation itself. We have learned from other successful library foundations. We've strengthened our governance. We've added board and volunteer energy. We've sought advice from people who know fundraising grants and communications. Most importantly, perhaps, we have started showing up in Venetia at community events, at our planned giving event that we hosted, marching in the July 3rd parade, supporting the book fair, building new relationships in a lot of ways. We're becoming less of a quiet organization in the background and more of an active community partner. So here are a couple of examples of our community outreach that we did within the last few months. One is the July 3rd parade, and the other was a planned giving event. And the speakers that you see here are Devin O'Shea, an associate attorney, and Ariel Castillo, a financial advisor, who worked with us on that event. Going forward, we're staying focused on four priorities. First, be known. Many people in Benicia still don't have an idea who we are. Second, be strong partners with you, with the library leadership, with the city, with the friends, and with the community. Third, grow giving through donors, bequests, community partners, grants, and the Day of Giving. And finally, prepare by building a 2027 thoughtful strategic plan aligned with the library's priorities. In essence, we're building relationships now that will make bigger things possible. We're encouraged because we can already see some pretty big momentum. Our net assets grew from $365,000 last year to $672,000 this July, an increase of roughly $307,000 or, in percentage, 84.1%. Now, a significant bequest was a substantial part of this, but we are deeply grateful. And it also shows what is possible. $672,000 is just the beginning. It's not the finish line. To really be ready for meaningful future capital opportunities, we need to support growing both our resources and the circle of people willing to invest in our life. And there's a reason to begin that work now. More than a quarter of our 31,000 square feet of the library remains unimproved. The building has served Benicia for more than three decades without any major change. So we're not here tonight with a proposal for that space. Those decisions belong in a thoughtful process with the library and the city. But we want to be ready. As the library changes, areas like accessibility, technology, flexible space, infrastructure, and resilience, our role is to help ensure private philanthropy can support the library's vision as it takes shape, and that we're ready for that. So what do we ask from you, the Library Board of Trustees? Mostly partnership. Help us align our efforts with library priorities. Help us tell the foundation's story. Help us identify donors, grants, partnerships, and support us financially when you can. And when the time is right, stand with us in telling our community why investing in this library matters so much. We're grateful for the vision and the support to date of our City Librarian, Jennifer Baker, and our Board of Library Trustee Representative, Todd Hickey. Our board is energy, our resources are growing, and we have a library worth investing in. Working together, we can help ensure that the extraordinary place continues to welcome, connect, and inspire Venetians for years to come. Thank you. And thank you for all of the board members of the Library Foundation for being here tonight.

That's excellent. It's great to see everyone. Thank you for that excellent report, Sharon. One thing, just for the record, and maybe I missed it, but for the benefit, I obviously know the answer having worked with you all, but for the benefit of anybody who might be listening and for the record, you said we're not the foundation or we're not the friends. Did you sort of... Put the foundation in more clearly, maybe, in the landscape. How does it fit in? What does it support? It's implicit in the slides, but just explicitly for anyone else who doesn't know.

OK. I'd be happy to. Hopefully, I'll speak adequately for all of us. The foundation board's main job is to raise money for things that are generally fall in the category of capital renovation, capital improvement, capital needs, things like new lighting, extended the building, major improvements in air conditioning, building out the lower level, and maybe specific programs that are designed either through bequests or that are outside of the kinds of programs that the Friends provides. Friends does a wonderful alternate program connecting value for the library, around connecting around books and the community in book giving, book buying, and the presence of the library every day for everyone, for all the citizens in town. The only other thing I want to say to that is because the library is a city-owned building, it's very important that as we think about how we serve board of trustees the city importantly the library that people understand that our job is to support that vision that is bigger than us it is not for us to drive it is for us to be in community with thank you absolutely clear thank you and i think that would be beneficial for anyone who's coming at this new

Any other questions?

Any other questions?

I just wanted to ask a little bit about what you see for next year. I mean, you're so busy this year. But what do you see coming in 2027?

Well, we are going to have a strategic planning event either in Q4 or the very beginning of 2027. So formally, I probably don't have much to say there. However, I have a passion that is personal as well as we've already been hearing it from our board. So I would say a few things are priorities. One is we don't have enough board members. What we're doing is, this is a big job. This board requires a lot of effort, a lot of community engagement, a lot of resources, a lot of who knows who, a lot of all of that. So I see three priorities next year. One is Build out our board. Number two, really think about outreach in very proactive, thoughtful, programmed ways, in multiple ways within our community and our community sectors and our grant opportunities and every other way we can do outreach. And the third is tie perspective money to what we're doing with outreach. So connect the two. so that we can start building a more stable way to acquire funds. Everything else probably falls in one of those categories.

I'm not quite sure I understood the mechanics of the last thing that you mentioned.

So, for example, if outreach includes getting to politicians to understand where grant access is, The reason that would be a priority in outreach would be because those would be services of funds in the future. So tie our outreach with very thoughtful effort. Given that we're not a very big board, we have to pick and choose what we're doing and try and figure out what those are that could create the biggest bang for the buck and also to gain momentum so that we can grow. This board has not been an active board for a number of years. And so There's a big ramp up in what we have to do. So that's kind of what I was getting at, Lois. Did I answer it?

Yes. Thank you very much.

I have a comment. I want to, first of all, congratulate you. This is a very excellent report, visually as well as your presentation. But you could do so much with this report. Who else is going to get this report? Everybody should get this report this report should be in the paper this or you should be interviewed by the papers you should This report should go obviously the City Council and and everybody should get I cannot tell you how many times people have asked me What's the difference between the friends of the library and the library foundation? Why do we have to have to what does it mean blah blah blah? I mean and I understand completely that you have your different priorities you have your different reasons for existing but this really explains it so anybody could understand it I think I think this is very well done and this needs to go out publicly I guess you could even put it on the library, put it out somewhere with a something.

We can definitely link to it on the website, but I actually like the idea of trying to maybe turn it into a press release or something and then definitely get in front of city council. maybe even talk to Mary Hand at Venetia Magazine and do an article or something like that. And particularly if you're able to do it timing-wise in conjunction with the Day of Giving, it might be a little late in the game to try to get it into the magazine, but you could definitely get it into the Herald.

Those are very good suggestions. Thank you. I was thinking about some of those things as I put this one together with the help of our executive committee. And I think I really want us to be in front of council early next year, Q1, what I would say. And we can turn this into various forms of outreach, which is what I'm hearing you say. So if I'm understanding that correctly, we will take that to heart.

Sorry, I made myself some notes. I mean, I think every city employee should get this so they know when somebody asks them. It's just what I'm just really impressed by. Thank you.

Well, there is going to be, we're also involved in the Solano Community Foundation Day of Giving on October 7th. So we can think about that as well. around that connection. And we are actually in there in the hopes that that's another form of outreach through the Solano Community Foundation to learn who we are and that we're here for all the reasons we just talked about. And what a wonderful way to support our library in our town through that event.

Thank you so much.

You're very welcome.

Port of the City Library.

I have a lot of really fun news this month. Some stuff finally happened. Nothing for updates to council or arts and culture, but I have some updates on our facility. On the bad news, we're still having HVAC issues. The HVAC that controls for the children's area, we've been fighting with it all summer. Fortunately, it hasn't been as hot as it could have been, but they're coming back. Wednesday is the last I heard that they're coming again to do something to it, pet it or something to make it happy. But we did have, we finally received our book bike and it is currently parked in the front of the library if you want to come by and take a look at it. We did take it out for a couple of brief spins around the parking lot. I don't know if anybody's been brave enough to venture beyond that yet, but we are planning to take it to the high school on a regular basis to take new materials to the teens there at the high school that they can actually check out materials directly from the book bike. So that's exciting. Our pods also finally were delivered and installed, and that's going very, very well. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out what sort of policies and procedures we needed to build around that. And so far, everybody's just behaving nicely and has been going very well. So we also finally are getting our computers. So we have three of the five computers that we had slated have actually been installed and are up and running on the new system. We are now officially off of Userful. We no longer have any user-filled machines. We're still expecting two more computers. When we first moved to this new system and we said we were going to drop down to only five computers, there was a little bit of concern about whether that would be enough. Well, we spent the last six or so weeks with only one computer, and nobody died. There was no bloodshed. So we did have a few times where we had to ask people politely to finish up quickly. I had one gentleman who came in, and he spent 45 minutes arguing with me about why he needed more time. And the entire time, the computer was actually available. And I was like, we're arguing about a computer giving you more time when you could just be using it. So, you know, I think he left happy. That was a weird interaction. I don't know. So now we have three. Everything is going just great. Summer reading program wrapped up. I think that I had reported on it briefly last month. But just so that you're aware, we had a 232% increase in participation this last year in summer reading. We also did a brief survey to the public about their experience in the summer reading program. We had, of the people who responded to that survey, 29%, almost 30%, so 29.2% of them, both an adult and child from the family, participated. Again, of the respondents, 30% of just an adult and 42% was an adult and child from the same family participated. The age groups that participated, 25% were under the age of five. 54% were between five and 12. We had 16.7% teenagers and the rest were adults that participated. 100% of the people who answered the survey said they preferred the new format. 100% said it was easy or very easy to understand. 92% said their overall experience was great or excellent. 96% reported a high likelihood that they would participate again next year. And some of the comments that we received was that it kept up the benefits of reading without having an argument, which I thought was fun. It was a nice reward for reading in the summer. It gave our family motivation and a visual of all the things we've done. It introduced me to other programs in the library. Encouraged us to come to the library more often. I read more. The kids looked forward to marking their accomplishments and counting how many more they needed so they could get another ticket. Kept us busy and engaged and provided incentive to build better reading habits. So all good things. That's the whole reason we do it. So very happy about that. I gave you a couple of different reports that are in your packet, and then a couple also that I just put in on the desk up there. The first is I included a copy of my report to the Friends. If you'll remember, a couple of years ago, they started asking for more detailed accounting of how we spend their contribution. So this is the one that I did for fiscal year 25-26. It includes a description of the different things that we did, which was $42,000 of their contribution went toward the purchase of materials, and a little less than $15,000 went toward library programs. And then the remainder went toward library staffing, which also supports programming. And then we also give them a very detailed actual line item. This is how much money was spent on books. This was how much money was spent on which programs, et cetera. So they were pleased with that. The other thing that you have in your packet is the Measure L report that goes to Solano County next week. Todd will be going to that meeting to represent Venetia. No surprises there. We actually made a little bit more money this last year than we did the previous year, so that was encouraging. Sales tax had kind of flattened for a couple of years, so it's not really keeping up with inflation, but at least it didn't go down. And then we have also I put You have in the packet the August financials because since we moved the meeting date We're now doing it a month and we're arrears, but on your desk there is a copy of the September Financials and this will appear again in next month's packet, but I just wanted to review a few things from it This this is the first month that we had I should say that this says it's labeled September, but most of the expenses are actually only through the end of August. So it includes August payroll. There are a couple of things that stood out to me when I was looking at it, so I just wanted to review them. The ones that are highlighted in yellow are the areas where we are over the expected percentage amount that we should be at this point in the year. The first two on the list are both from... Payroll, so one is deferred compensation. We're at 20% instead of 16.7%. I'm not concerned about that because that is managed by finance. So if that number fluctuates, they will cover it. The PERS UAL number is at 100% simply because that's a once-a-year payment and they just made it out of this first quarter. Advertising, that one, it's a small amount of money, but we did overspend. That was an accident on my part because I discovered, unfortunately, the hard way that the way that advertising on Facebook works and the way that it works on Instagram are not the same. And so we blew about half of our budget in the first month of the year because we were... spending a lot of time telling teens to come to one particular event. The good news is that they did. But it would have been nice to have not spent all of that money right then and there. So we're watching it very carefully now and just being very judicious about when we're going to be using advertising dollars for the rest of the year. Contract services is also a little higher than that 16.67%. But again, that is primarily because of contracts that we pay at the beginning of the year. They're not things that we would continue to get monthly bills for. Same thing is true for software as service. Computer maintenance is, again, it's a small amount of money, but it is overspent. The reason for that is because we had to do some electrical work when we changed the computer array. And so that was an unanticipated expense. I'm going to leave that there right now. just watch it and as we get closer to the end of the fiscal year probably what will happen is we will have some funds in another line item that we can move around to fix that gap library materials is a little bit higher but that's partly because we have two separate funds for library materials we have the general fund and we also have the friends money which we don't spend until the library materials general fund is exhausted And grants, same thing is true for the PERS UAL. It's a once a year. And also the same thing is true under friends. The one thing that's a little bit off and I still need to detangle is the friends and donations contract services amount is higher than it should be. That is because of a change that was made in the finance department where they started encumbering funds on contracts. We're required to have a contract for every performer. To try to lighten our administrative load, one of the things that we did was we changed a lot of our contracts to be multi-year contracts and multi-program contracts. So if we had somebody that came and did an event that we thought we might have again, we would just do a contract for 10 of those programs with a not-to-exceed amount. In previous iterations of that, the money did not get encumbered. Finance changed that to where they encumbered the entire amount, even though the events were not scheduled. And so I'm working with finance right now to back us out of that. And we've come to an agreement with them that they're going to use a different contract template for us for that purpose so that it adds a little extra paperwork, but it keeps us in good faith with them. And that will not make it look like we've already spent all of our money because we haven't. So, unless you have any questions, that's the finance report. There was a question, had been a couple questions over the last couple of months about some things that I just have some information to report out on. The first is on impact fees. That is something that came up. I can't remember if it originated with the board or with the foundation, but both were interested in that. What I found out... is that the library impact fees were, well, all the city impact fees are done at the same time. And so there is no option for us to go and change the library impact fee separately from the rest of the impact fees. That is done every eight years. The last time it was done was in 2020, and it is a multi-year process. So sometime in the very near future, they should start asking me about the next one, which would go into effect in 2028. One of the things that I am interested in talking to them about when we get to that stage is what the impact fees are based on, because there's four criteria in the current report from 2020, and two of them don't make any sense to me as to why they were even used. The first one was the cost of replacing an ILS, which is our integrated library system with our catalog and patron database. There were two issues with that. First is the amount of money that was estimated for the cost of changing it was $100,000, which is ridiculous. There's no way it would ever cost that much. In fact, last time we did it, when we moved from... What were we on before? Carl. Carl to Polaris. There was actually no charge to us because we had reserve funds established with Splash Consortium, and we were able to use those. So there was no cost, and even if there had been, it would have been closer to $25,000 than $100,000. The other thing that was problematic about that is it's estimated that we would change our ILS every five to ten years, which is not true. The last change that we did was the first one we had done in over 30 years. I mean, while it's not impossible that we would change at this point in time, I'm not anticipating that we would change anytime soon. So that number was a little weird. The other one that they were using was the cost of the collection. which is problematic because that's not a capital expense. A collection is something that happens every year and is ongoing. The other thing that's problematic about that is that we oftentimes, particularly as we're moving to more digital content, we're not actually purchasing material. We're purchasing a license that has to be renewed every couple of years or every certain number of checkouts. So for us to say that there's a single one-time thing cost that is associated with an additional number of people being added to our community. That's not a good metric for that. So when we do get around to it and start that process, we'll be talking about what do we need to include in an impact fee. And most of it is going to be the basement, is going to be improvements that we would make to the facility that would be associated with new people coming to the community. It's not going to be anything that would be a standard ongoing operations. I mean, it might be nice to get a nice check once every 10 years for something, but it's not something that would have any kind of impact on ongoing operations. So you'll be hearing more about that later when we get to it.

Excuse me, Kendra. Could I ask, so when you said that the fees are only changed – Every eight years, does that mean that there's no adjustment for inflation as well?

There is an adjustment made annually, but they don't do a full review except every eight years. So when they did the last review back in 2020, they did do a substantial increase to the impact fee, and it has gone up. I don't know if it's gone up annually, but they at least look at it once a year. I'm not really clear on what formula they're using to determine how it goes up, if it's just a standard amount or if it's based on inflation or something else. But it does get reviewed annually, and it can go up annually. It's just that the overall impact study happens once every eight years.

Instead of, just I'm sorry, one more clarifying question. Instead of using these things like replacing an ILS, I mean, is there any thought to using comparable data from comparable library?

That's what I'm hoping. And I'm not certain what justification was used for using, for picking those other criteria last time. I don't believe they used a consultant. I think they did it totally internally. I don't know if going forward, if the city would use a consultant, but what I'm told is that when whoever's doing it, they're supposed to come and talk to me. So, What we all need to do is think about, you know, what are some realistic measures that we can use, like things like replacement of furniture or something like that that, you know, everybody benefits from, but you would expect to have to keep the library up to date and usable for an expanded community. This is the whole point of it. Any other questions about impact, please?

Just to clarify, so there's separate library impact fees?

Yes. And so when a new developer comes in, there's a certain amount that they have to pay.

For parks or sewer or whatever?

Exactly.

I guess I didn't realize libraries were part of that.

Not every community has that, but many of them do. And so one of the things that we will do when we get the opportunity to review this again is look at what other libraries are doing. Because one of the things that they do right now is it has, there's two levels. There's one for single-family resident, and there's one for multifamily resident. When I was investigating this, I found that a number of communities that do have library impact fees use square footage instead. And so then they have just a straight amount based on square footage. So if you're building a multi-family location versus a single family location, it would be different just depending on how large of a space you were creating. So the other thing that I'm still trying to untangle is the library basement fund. This one, I'm having a hard time getting information from finance. And part of the issue is that they digitized their records and moved to a new system in 2018. And what they're telling me is that they don't have easy access. Well, they first told me they didn't have access. And when I dug a little bit more, I found that they don't have easy access. to previous to 2018. Because we do have reports going back to 2010 just available on the city's website. We have their annual financial, I can't remember what it stands for. It's AFCR financial comprehensive report. And that one, it's very, if you look at 2010, And there's a number reported for 2010, and then it's not reported at all in 2011. But then when you look at 2012, there's a line item for the library fund, and it's gone down by about $18,000. And so my question is, what happened to that $18,000? Did we spend it on something? So somewhere there's got to be a transfer out record of that. But... I'm trying to figure out who would have that information, where is it. It's probably going to be in paper form, so it's going to require a bit of digging and research and comparing. And just right now what I'm asking finance to do is just explain to me what I'm looking at. When I see these numbers, what do these mean? Because, again, when you look at one report and then you look at another report from two years later or three years later or four years later, they're all different. And so you can't really do an apples-to-apples comparison. Figure to track that money, so if they can at least tell me when I'm looking at these numbers. What does this mean? At the very least we might be able to track we may not be able to find transfer out numbers, but we can at least compare the cumulative report the comprehensive report to the annual budget and Because if there was $18,000, for instance, that disappeared somewhere between 2010 and 2012, that $18,000 needs to appear somewhere in the budget if it's not in the report. So it's going to take some time to continue digging for that. Just so you're aware, I am going to be keynoting the Future of Libraries Conference on October 1st in San Francisco. I will be there talking about the... No reading required project that we did last year. I'm also going to be presenting on that at CLA in Riverside later in the month and speaking of CLA we've got five staff members going myself Amber Molina our children's librarian Patrice and Jeff our adult services librarian And I believe amber is also bringing her son who is thinking about going to library school so Any questions?

I would just say more of a comment. You didn't mention this vision.

Reports yes, which I thought was a really which I'm also presenting on the vision of the vision report I've mentioned it a couple of times Over it's something we've been working on with the State Library for over a year we started working on this in June of 25 and it's it's a vision for California public libraries that the State Library is using now to plan for how they're going to spend federal dollars as well as state dollars. And it's also meant to be used as an advocacy tool by individual libraries. Although I didn't put it on here as an action item, if the board were interested in endorsing this vision, we could put that on a future agenda as an action if it's something that you feel strongly about doing. I'm going to be presenting on that in October at the Public Library Director Forum, which is the forum that all the library directors from across the state go to. So myself and three other library directors that have been working on this project for the last year, we're going to be presenting that to all of the directors across California and then doing some... follow up with them to like, okay, now what? We have this document, what do we do with it? We are actually looking at three different projects that are going to be funded through the State Library that are coming out of this already. The first one is creating a curriculum for executive coaching for library directors and assistant directors, anybody who's interested in moving up into a director type position. Because What often happens in libraries across the world is the director ends up being the person who's been there the longest, not necessarily the person who knows what they're doing. So we want to try to build some framework for, you know, okay, so you're a director now. What does that mean? And what skills do you need to develop around that? So that's one piece of it. Another one that we're doing is something called ecosystem... ecosystem navigation so to that's what we're calling it if I can explain what I mean by that is that libraries all over the United States are being asked to do more than they're used to doing and not I'm not talking about different types of collections or you know digital versus print I'm talking about like feeding the homeless and and providing shelter during emergencies and providing social workers to people and things like that. And so a lot of libraries are trying to figure out how do we manage that space? How do we make certain that we're at the table so that we can bring the resources that we have to the community, but without overburdening ourselves and getting us pushed out of this mission creep and doing things that we're not equipped to do. We don't have the resources and we don't have the expertise. And so one of the things that we're doing is a study across California to kind of get a general picture. What are libraries already doing? What's being done in this community versus this community? Is it a county system? Is it a municipal library? Is it rural or urban? So what levels of access do people have in their communities? Why are they coming to the library for expecting these things? And then try to build some frameworks and toolkits around, okay, you've been asked to do fill in the blank. What do I do now? And so, again, trying to get a little bit more in front of these issues and being able to control our own destiny rather than just being told, okay, now you're in charge of this. So that's one of the other things that we're working on. The other one is we're doing a study, a statewide study on resource sharing. We do a lot of resource sharing. You know, North Net, which I talk about a lot, 41 different libraries across Northern California Link Plus, interlibrary loan, zip books, all these different things that we do. Not every library participates in those things. So we're trying to get a general map of what's happening now and then figuring out which of those systems is the most economical and which ones could we build on and leverage to do more. without an increase in resources. So that's three different projects that we're working on. A couple of those are going to be led by consultants that the state library is paying for, and then a couple of them are just being done with different directors across the state that are going to be taking up parts of that.

Yeah, I thought this was a very impressive document, even inspirational. So... Although I am not able to make a motion that we endorse it as chair, I certainly would be open to such.

Let me just ask one question before, because I think we should endorse this, because this is a very ambitious vision. And to get somewhere, you have to know where you're going. We think of the library as where you start your inquiry about what it's like to live in Venetia. I'm not sure that idea is captured in this vision, or did I just not construe that right?

I imagine it's in there somewhere. we did try to build it in a way that was open enough to where you could shoehorn a lot of stuff in. So, yeah, it's, you know, one of the things that I will say that we, it's interesting as we were, we worked on this for about six months writing it. And then when we were done with it, We started sending it out to people to get feedback, and we were really surprised, actually, at a lot of feedback from library directors that didn't like it. They thought it was promising too much. Or, you know, it's like, I don't want to put my name on this because then I'm going to be required to do this. And so one of the things that we've been trying, the message we've been trying to send get across is that this is really about direction not destination this is like we're all of us what you know it's really about also work speaking with a unified voice and so that when we go to talk to electeds or potential donors or members of the community we're all saying the same thing Because we are all saying the same thing. We're just not necessarily using the same language and we're not doing it together. So that was a big chunk of what we're trying to do. It came out of... A conversation that happened right after the Trump administration yanked all of the federal funding. And so we were like, okay, we don't have any money. But when we do have money, what are we going to do with it? And how are we going to prioritize? And so that's where this started, was trying to get everybody on the same page. But trying to get 141 different libraries to all agree. That was, it turned out to be far more challenging than we anticipated.

But I think it's successful. I mean, I read it as very much a big tent document, so.

Get the phrasing right here. I move that the board endorse

We can't do that today, but what you can do is agendize it. You can say you want to put it in a future agenda.

But we have to vote on putting it on the agenda.

I'll second that.

Is there a roll for this?

I'm so used to having more people here. Lois Kazakov, yes. Trustee Ruth Workman?

Yes.

President Todd Hickey?

Yes.

We'll get it on next month.

I don't think there's any Jennifer you finished then OK. So we move on then to the consent calendar to the minutes. Do I have any? Comments or corrections about the minutes. I have one thing I think that probably needs some. Clarification. And that is in 7 C. This isn't how I remember it so I just and I think it's it's probably unclear to a reader so Working with the city attorney to designate what authority the board has That's fine with regard to policy that does not change and what is procedure which is changeable. I don't think that was what you report it I

I actually just spoke with the city attorney today about that and tried to get some clarification and he agreed that it was a little nebulous but did not really have any real recommendations for changing it. He did point out that there is a bit of a caveat in the municipal code that says that any policies or That nature would be developed in concert with library administration So it's not like the library board could come in and start making policies Left and right that didn't that I hadn't recommended right that was my recollection.

It just didn't maybe maybe I'm not reading it carefully enough, but Yeah, so Okay, I guess it's all right.

Do you want to amend it?

I'm trying to think about how I would amend it after what Jennifer said, so. I suppose it can stay. Any other? Okay, may I have a motion to approve the minutes?

I'll make a motion that we approve the minutes of August 3rd, 2026.

I second.

Okay, may I have the roll?

Lois Kazakov. Aye. Trustee Ruth Workman. Aye. President Todd Hickey.

Aye. Moving on to the next item, action and discussion. There are no action items. Communications from staff and members? No? Okay. Then if there's nothing under that category, I will move that we... Move I will adjourn the meeting at 6 57 p.m. Next meeting is It's October 5th, okay, October 5th. Thank you Elaine meeting adjourned. Thank you all for coming