Library Vote Fails in OR County

Despite endorsements from the Medford City Council, various League of Women Voters chapters, and the Mail Tribune, voters in Jackson County, OR, on May 14 soundly defeated a local levy that would have allowed the 15-branch Jackson County Library Services (JCLS) to reopen after closing on April 7 (see News, LJ 5/1/07, p. 16).

Jackson and four other rural counties in southwest Oregon have been significantly dependent on federal payments that replace county revenue from timber harvests on formerly private land, but those federal subsidies last year were not renewed.

More than 59 percent of those voting, or 31,876 individuals, opposed the levy, nearly the same results as a similar vote last November. The ballot would have raised $8.3 million a year for three years, adding $108 annually on a house assessed at the county average of $167,000, according to the Mail Tribune.

“I think [the voters are] just sending the message they don't want to pay any more property taxes,” JCLS interim director Ted Stark told LJ. In June, a county task force is expected to report on potential new revenue streams for each county department. While that task force may recommend the formation of a library district, last year library planners couldn't get local city councils to support it.

JCLS has had a skeleton crew of six maintaining facilities and, ironically, monitoring the construction of a new library building and the planning for another, both funded by a $38.9 million bond passed in 2000. “I'm sitting in a two-year-old, 83,000 square foot headquarters library,” Stark said. “It's dark, and there's nobody here.”

The levy's most vocal opponent, realtor Don Rist, had opposed the 2000 bond issue, which revamped 14 branches, calling them “Taj Mahals.” He told the Mail Tribune that Jackson County library officials should have asked for a smaller levy and previously cut services when they saw the federal money—which provided 70 percent of the system's budget—was on the way out.

In neighboring Josephine County, the four-library system, already down to shoestring service, was to close at the end of May after about 60 percent of voters turned down a levy to help fund the sheriff's department and the county planned to shift funds to public safety. “It's a sad day, but sometimes these things have to happen,” library manager Cessa Vichi told LJ, “so the public knows...it has to come from us, the community.”

In an editorial before the vote, the Mail Tribune decried that “in the parallel universe that is Washington, DC, none of [the crisis in Oregon] constitutes an emergency.”