Municipal governments charge fees for golf courses, water parks, and other services. Why not for libraries?
Think for a minute why governments charge fees for the recreational facilitites they run. Golf courses require regular (that is, daily) maintenance, and there’s usually someone around to check receipts to see if a duffer has paid the greens fee. Given the nature of the game, specifying the “gate” is fairly easy: the first tee box.
Cities can apply the same logic to the municipal swimming pool: it requires daily maintenance (and for legal reasons, someone has to be there looking over people anyway), there’s an easily identified entrance, and to a degree even greater than the golf course, it’s possible to exclude people who don’t pay.
Michigan applies the same logic to its state parks, many of which include Great Lakes beaches: walking on the beach is free, but if you want to enter the parking lot–a piece of land with a specific point of entry–you have to pay. The gate or guard house provides the opportunity to collect revenue. (The state may also ban on-street parking near the gate, if it wants to discourage those who would simply walk in without paying.)
So … why don’t we do the same thing for libraries? Like the fenced-in pool or the parking lot for the state beach, a library has a defined entrance. It requires maintenance and an active staff.
Charge people an entrance fee to the library and the library becomes self-supporting–or at least it moves in that direction. Many libraries already charge for a card–that is, they may charge non-residents for a card that allows for borrowing privileges.
Does this move threaten democracy by restricting the distribution of news? One could once make that case, but it’s a difficult one to make today. Information is freely available at home–many people, even the poor, have cable TV service with multiple news channels. Taxpayers support public radio programs, with a healthy dose of news, through taxes and voluntary donations. Use of the Internet is increasing in homes, and many people have access to it on the job. Of course there are also online booksellers, bricks-and-mortar booksellers, untold numbers of informative web sites, free newspapers, and so forth.
And if all this sounds like the poor are being neglected, consider that charities could readily form to offer “library scholarships.” And with various public assistance programs in place (SSI, food stamps, housing vouchers, the earned income tax credit, etc.), it’s not as if the poor (and in many cases, the non-poor as well) aren’t receiving taxpayer support for life’s needs and wants.
The public already offers those who receive taxpayer support ample discretion in its use of services, including (in the case of the EITC), the ability to purchase any product or service the recipient wants. Why not, then, make library access one of those services that is subsidized not by institutional allocations, but, when desirable, by welfare payments to financially needy households? For the rest of us, maybe it’s time to pay up through fees rather than taxes.