Larkspur Daily

A writers' group priced out at $750 sends the Library Board back to its own fee schedule — with a December revisit

The only city meeting of the week produced the week's only real argument, and it was about money the library hasn't collected yet. The board spent most of Monday night on a proposed rental policy for its three meeting rooms: a $25 non-refundable reservation fee for every user, a $100 setup fee for theater-style seating in the large room, and hourly rates of $50 for the medium room, $125 for the large and $30 for the small, with waivers for government bodies and nonprofits serving Larkspur. Insurance would be required only for the large room, Room 2.

Then the director offered a real-world test case. A writers' group had asked about booking the large room for recurring monthly meetings — a package that would have run about $750 — and never followed up once it saw the numbers. One board member proposed a sliding scale, with a pricier first hour and cheaper hours after, so clubs and tutoring groups aren't turned away while rooms sit dark. Another pushed back on the refund rule: keeping the $25 when a renter cancels is fair enough, but not when the city is the one canceling.

The board didn't rewrite the rates. Instead it handed staff a punch list — clarify that insurance applies only to Room 2, fix the page numbering in the application packet, and strike the ambiguous "or sold" language about alcohol — and accepted staff's suggestion to revisit the fee structure in December, once there's a record of which groups the pricing actually deters. That is a reasonable plan and also a five-month experiment in which the subjects don't know they're being studied.

Because the board's next regular meeting isn't until September 14, nothing more happens on this until fall.

Four pages hired, two full-time jobs posted, and a six-day library penciled in for late fall

The staffing picture is the brighter half of the story. The director reported that four new part-time pages have been hired and have already cleared the book-drop and shelving backlog, and that recruitment is open for two full-time Library Assistant positions handling circulation and desk duties. If those hires land in September, the added coverage could let the library move to six-day-a-week service, likely late fall or early winter. The sixth day would probably be Monday, possibly with evening hours in a rough 2-to-7 window — the schedule isn't settled.

Growth is showing up as friction elsewhere. The parking lot is chronically over capacity, worsened by construction and closure at the nearby Corte Madera library, and staff are managing with signage and neighbor coordination. Demand for the outdoor book locker is high enough that staff are weighing a second bank of lockers. Summer programming is running hot: story times pulling 75 to 100 attendees, plus puppet, drumming and slime workshops, circus and bubble events, Read to a Dog, chess, an informal D&D club, senior life-story groups, a wellness series, museum talks, a mahjong intro and senior tech tutoring.

Two quieter notes deserve attention. School-year outreach is planned for Hall and Neil Cummins; a board member asked that Bacich and Kent be added, since many of those students already use the library. And the director observed that most older patrons from the old library haven't followed it to the new building — she doesn't think they care for the new facility's modernness. A board member asked whether staff could at least confirm those patrons are still receiving newsletters.