City Residents Under 18 Will Be Exempt From County Library Fee In/Around: North Division
Youthful city residents won’t have to pay fees to use county libraries, and Eva Lusk is relieved.
She is the children’s librarian at the North Spokane County Library, at Hawthorne and Colfax. Twenty-five percent of her clients live inside Spokane city limits - which are only three blocks from the library.
Last week the Spokane County Library decided to exempt city residents under 18 years old from a $55-a-year fee to use its libraries.
The city-run Spokane Public Library system has been imposing a usage fee on noncity residents since January. The county will begin charging city residents a $55 annual fee April 1.
“The children are the most important library customers,” Lusk said. “If you’re considering paybacks, then imposing no fees is wrong, but it’s the right thing to do as far as children are concerned.”
The new fees have been a source of consternation to city and county residents, who for years used each others’ library systems as though they were one.
Most of the city residents at the North Spokane County Library are neighborhood kids who walk, ride their bikes or get dropped off by their parents. For them, the county-run library is just the neighborhood library.
“It’s hard to get students into written research materials that the library has unless it’s convenient for them,” she said.
The nearest city libraries are at Hillyard and in the Shadle Park shopping center.
Library cards for kids will be specially coded so they can only be used by the person to whom they are issued. Parents and other adults will not be able to use the youth cards.
The county library board also voted to work with teachers at elementary schools like Indian Trail, Woodridge, Brentwood and Shiloh Hills that serve both city and county residents. Teachers at those schools lost some of their library use under the new fee schedules.
But county library director Mike Wirt said his libraries would pay teachers’ fees to make sure they had use of the city or county libraries.