On 06/15/2021, the Library Board voted to approve a proposal to make the Appleton Public Library a fine-free library.
One member of the public participated in the public comment portion of the meeting.
Nick Ross, Vice-President of the board of the Friends of Appleton Public Library spoke in favor of eliminating library fines. He spoke about his personal experience with library fines and how his life would have been impacted by no library fines. Although he is a good place in his life and the American Dream is starting to come to fruition for him it wasn’t always the case. After he graduated college, the 2008 recession hit and he had a hard time finding a job. He was living off unemployment in a windowless studio apartment. The library was the place he went to get out of the head, print things for unemployment, and look for jobs. Even though he lived nearby, he had fines. He spoke of the negative psychological impact and sense of shame that returning his books was just one more thing he couldn’t do right. Although the library never had a policy that people could not use the library services if they had outstanding debt it still produced a sense of shame about using the library as a resource. He shared that personal experience as a way to encourage them to move forward with this proposal. He said it was pointed out at a Friends of the Library meeting that this mostly impacts children, and he felt that kids didn’t need to be punished for mistakes that, many times, were out of their control. He said the people who run the library do their best to make it a welcoming and inclusive environment for everyone and he thought this would be one more step in the direction of making everyone feel welcome and not have a looming question of personal responsibility weighing over their shoulders when they just need to print a document, find shelter for a little bit, or just get out of their windowless apartment for a couple hours.
Library Director Colleen Rortvedt reviewed the high points of her memo regarding this proposal with the Library Board.
Back in 2019 they had several educational sessions about the impact of overdue fines. There has also been a broader movement going on throughout the country, not just recently but over a longer period of time, for libraries to go fine free. When the pandemic hit, that became an irrelevant issue because Appleton suspended collections during that time, first out of a concern about transmission through physical contact with money, and then eventually because they imposed quarantine periods on material so their data on what was overdue was unreliable. They were now at the point where they needed to decide whether or not to reinstate fines which is why she was bringing this proposal now instead of waiting. She didn’t want to reinstate them and then bring this proposal forward in a few months to eliminate them. Additionally, they will be bringing the 2022 budget forward next month and the elimination of fines would impact the budget in some ways so she wanted them to vote on it now so this change could be incorporated into the budget.
If the proposal was approved, they would stop assessing fine on late materials and clear existing fines on patrons’ accounts. There were a couple of exceptions in that they could not waive billed items or some select fines incurred at other libraries and they would not be able to waive bills for lost or damaged items. So, there is still an incentive to return items in good condition.
She reviewed the different between fines and bills. Bills are still the ultimate negative incentive to get items back, and they do work with a collections agency and the city’s attorney’s office on the tax revenue intercept program. The real goal is to get the items they have spent time collecting and cataloguing back so they can be returned to circulation. A patron would receive a series of reminders before a bill would be sent to the collections agency. Bills would not be eliminated.
Overdue fines are different from bills. They’re small charges assessed for items that have not been returned. Each item can accumulate up to $5 in fines and patrons are blocked from checking out after accumulating $5 in overdue fines. Overdue fines are assessed for items that have been returned but are returned late.
The proposal went through the biggest questions people have. One concern is for if materials don’t come back, but as outlined, they have a process with the collections agency for that. They also have the ability for people to auto renew.
There is the question of how much fines really help fund the library which is a nuanced issue. The fine revenue actually goes into the city’s general fund, and fine revenue has been dwindling because the library has so many beneficial reminder tools as well as the ability to renew from home. Fines have also been dwindling as a revenue source and she expected to see that trend continue even if the Board opted to not remove them.
There’s also the moral debate of should fines be used to instill personal responsibility and what is the library’s role in instilling personal responsibility? She said the truth is that, if fines were effective, they wouldn’t really have any fines so it isn’t actually effective at doing that. As they look at it more and more, fines just seem to be a barrier to people accessing services, as illustrated by the public comment.
She noted that this wasn’t just a trend for libraries but a long-term movement across the country. In some places they’ve never charged fines, or, at least, never charged fines on children’s materials. Locally Menasha, Kaukauna, and Little Chute are all fine free, and every library in the region has a desire to go fine free so there was the issue of staying on equal footing with other area libraries. They didn’t want people to be disincentivized from going to Appleton vs a different area library.
She then reviewed who was being hurt by fines. 11.65% of patrons in the database are blocked by fines from checking materials out. 16.5% of those are minors who can least afford the fines and may not even be responsible for the fines in the first place. She said it was a shame for a child who wanted to use the library to not be able to. There was also evidence that patrons who are blocked by fines often stop being patrons altogether. The average fine on a blocked card for materials is $15.20. On average, the last checkout date was 2014 and then their cards expired in 2016 which indicated that they stopped using the library. That is not representative of the Library’s mission and values of Welcoming, Literacy, Community, and Access.
She said there were a lot of reasons to approve this proposal, and they did have a funding plan to present along with that proposal. Making sure that eliminating overdue fines doesn’t have a negative impact on some other part of their operating budget was the main hurdle for them. She had worked through a plan with both the city’s Finance Director and the Mayor to create a progressive plan to provide funding that comes from the Lost and Paid line for 3 years in a progressively decreasing amount to offset the revenue lost from fines. This will ensure that there isn’t a $30,000 hole in the city’s general fund, although she added that $30,000 is a very small percentage of that total fund. This year, because of pandemic service levels, there was no proposal to shift any funding to fill the gap cause by the loss of fine revenue because they will have saving and will be okay. Next year, they’ll take $25,000, the year after that $15,000, and the year after that $5,000. And after that, fines will be a distant memory.
If the Board approved the proposal, they would update the finance policy to include this short term variance in the existing policy. It would go to the Finance Committee and the Common Council as an information item so that the Council is not blindsided when budget time arrives. Once the item has gone through those channels, the Library would then officially go fine free.
She asked Owen, the Library’s Public Services Supervisor, if he could share some comments about interactions he and his staff had had with patrons regarding fines.
Owen said the data shows how patrons use their cards for a while, get fines, and then just stop using the library entirely, but that wasn’t all of the story. They have patrons come in every day who can’t use the library because of their fine. The materials are returned, but the fines are blocking them. Most heartbreakingly and a situation that happens frequently is they have a new adult—18 or 19 years old—who comes in excited to get their first library card as an adult. Staff looks them up and find they have an existing account that maybe hasn’t been used in a number of years and it is blocked with fines. So these people’s first experience being welcomed back to the library is the library letting them know they have $5 or $10 in fines on their account, probably from a field trip when they were 7 or 8 years old. One colleague said that her husband refuses to put holds on his own card because he has fines and the self-check chimes if you have a fine which is so terribly embarrassing for him that he has his wife pick up all of his holds because he just can’t deal with that. He said they also regularly hear parents tell their kids that they can only check out two items because if it’s more than that they won’t be able to keep track of them, they’ll items will be returned late, and they’ll get too many fines. He said when he himself first interviewed for a job at the library 4 years ago he was terrified in that interview that somebody would look at his account. He had lived in Appleton for about a year and had probably racked up and paid for $100 in fines. It produced a sense of shame and made him question if he was using the library incorrectly. He thought a lot of people felt like that.
He said, as library staff, they want to encourage people to use the library as much as fully as possible. They don’t want parents limiting their kids’ checked out materials. They don’t want people afraid to use the self-check. They want people to come to the desk without any shame. He thought removing fines would be an amazing way to improve the service that they provide to the community.
They then opened things up for discussion.
One Board member asked what the billing timeline would be with the new policy for non-returned or damaged items.
Director Rortvedt reviewed the timeline for notice and being sent to the collections agency.
- 1 day before the due date a courtesy notice is sent.
- 3 days overdue a notice is sent.
- 14 days overdue another overdue notice is sent.
- 28 days overdue a bill is mailed to the address on the library account.
- 45 days overdue accounts owing $50 or more are referred to the collections agency.
- 46 days over the collections agency mails a letter.
- 67 days overdue the collections agency begins calling.
She noted that the collections agency’s approach is a gentle nudge. They’re really trying to get the patron back to the library to have a conversation if the issue is that they can’t afford to pay. The library does work with folks to develop a payment plan. She said the collections agency they use is one that specifically works with libraries on overdue collections.
Board President Rebecca Kellner wanted to clarify that none of that would change regardless of how the Board voted on the fine removal proposal.
Director Rortvadt confirmed that and said that if they ever needed to change something like the triggering point to send a bill to collections, they would make sure to inform the Board.
A Board member asked if they would be able to track the timeliness of returns after the change and compare it to before the change. She was curious if people would continue to return things mostly on time or start taking longer.
Owen said he thought the last year had been a good test of that because they had not been assessing fines and they had not seen people returning materials later than normal. [I would think, though, that the people who used the library during the pandemic were possibly the people who were more organized to begin with and able to keep on top of stuff.]
The Board member said it would be interesting if they could report that out in six months again and Owen said that would be doable.
One Board member had to leave early, but he said he supported this proposal and would vote yes if the vote came before he left. As the teen librarian he often had teens coming in to his programs who could use services at the library but not check anything out because they had overloaded fines on their cards. Some of them would read in the library and had innovative ways to make sure the books they were reading in the library were in the same spot from day to day.
A Board member asked how long the local libraries who had gone fine free had been that way and what were the negatives of having done that.
Director Rortvadt said none of them had reported any negatives and none had dialed back the decision to go fine free. Kaukauna, Menasha, and Oshkosh all went fine free some time around the fall of 2019. Kimberly and Little Chute were a joined library which then reestablished themselves as separate libraries. When Little Chute made that change, it went fine free.
She said that when Chicago went fine-free they saw a 240% increase in returns of overdue materials. The thought was, once people had a fine of $5 for an inexpensive book, they would decide to just keep the book. When the fine was removed, they felt free to do the right thing and return the material.
A Board member suggested that a fine was almost like permission to keep something longer in some cases.
A Board member asked how they would go about informing patrons of the change and help them understand how it works. She said that she had to read the memo a couple times to grasp the difference between fines and bills.
Director Rortvadt said that was already a conversation that happens at the service desk right now and staff was skilled at that. She said that, in terms of notifying the community broadly, after the Finance Committee and Common Council were informed about it, the library planned to hold some kind of event. She said the mayor was supportive of the change and would be happy to lend his presence and words to magnify the message. She also noted that that would be helpful in letting the community know that the library is open.
A Board member asked how they would communicate to the public that they can still be assessed fines from other libraries and said they assumed that was due to the Appleton Public Library being part of a consortium of libraries.
Owen said those were tricky things regardless. Those fines were usually the result of some other library putting a fine on somebody’s account for something like a postage stamp or printing. Those fines cannot be waived. He said those sorts of fines were usually the result of a patron having formerly been at another library and then having moved to Appleton, but their existing fines for something like a broken CD case travelled with them. He said they weren’t really bills but not really fines either, and that library would retain the right to collect them.
The Board member clarified that those fines were not the result of someone, for example, having put a hold on a book that was coming from Sturgeon Bay and then returned late.
Owen said that, no, that situation would not result in a fine.
A Board member opinied that that this could bring forward and elevate a conversation regarding the responsibility library users all share to bring their materials back on time. There won’t be a fine, but they do need to return the items to participate in the library community. She said she did have some subtle scepticisms about whether patrons really were stopping using the library because they had fines. She thought they didn’t have enough specific data to say that once they got the fines they just stopped showing up. She thought there could be other circumstances playing into that.
Director Rortvadt agreed they couldn’t know all those individual stores and there were going to be other complicating factors into why a patron’s card expired, but she did think that it was enough of a trend that it indicated that played a part in an active library card user becoming an inactive user. She noted that their database is also very carefully controlled and a person cannot have two cards in the systm. Even if a person is coming from Kaukauna or Sturgeon Bay and moving to Appleton, they keep their same card and identity. They don’t get to create a new card because they moved to a new location.
The Board Member pointed out that a person could go to the WinneFox library system which Director Rortvadt agreed could happen.
Board President Kellner said she was hearing a lot of support for the concept, and she was on board with it. She didn’t like the idea that fines might make people ask themselves if they were using the library correctly. That seemed like a barrier. She thought the trade off was the financial piece. The funds to pay for this were supposed to come from the Lost and Paid fund. She confirmed that that was the fund for money they took in when they billed patrons for materials and then asked what that fund normally looked like. How much would they be taking out of that fund and what would the ramifications of that be?
Director Rortvadt said the Lost and Paid fund was something they do not include in the budget process because they can’t anticipate how many bills they will collect over the course of the year. Instead, that money was something they brought throughout the year to the Library Board as budget amendments to the Library’s Material’s budget. Their Materials Budget is about $595,000, and there are years where they amend that by $30,000-$40,000. That did mean that there would be a period of time with a reduction of how much the Material’s budget got amended, but they felt that there was likely going to be a counterbalancing effect of more materials being returned and potentially long-overdue items being returned. As a result, they thought it was an affordable transition plan. She noted that they also expected to be in some sort of interim library service mode for the next couple years due to the building project, so they’re already going to have less space for collections right now anyways.
President Kellner asked if taking $25,000 from the Lost and Paid fund this next year to pay for going fine-free was reasonable given that the Lost and Paid fund would presumably decrease if, as hoped for, patrons returned their materials more.
Director Rortvadt said that just like all their revenue targets, if they are underbudgeted they will find ways to offset that from other revenues. But, for one year, she was not overly concerned that there would be a huge gap.
There were no other comments, thoughts, or questions, so the Board voted on the item and approved it unanimously.
[I will say, nobody on the Board discussed the issue of how this change is going to negatively affect writers of police procedurals. Now when some lowly staff writer is slaving away at the latest episode of “Appleton: Murder City” they won’t be able to have Sergeant Chue Thao tell Chief Thomas, “The victim was an angel. No speeding tickets. No parking tickets. She doesn’t even have a library fine.” Because Chief Thomas will say to him, “Nobody in Appleton has library fines.” On a more serious note, if this results in a 240% increase in overdue materials being returned, as happened in Chicago, it sounds like it would definitely be worth it.]
View full meeting details here: https://cityofappleton.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=827709&GUID=4D55D24E-AA3A-48E0-863A-4AB81D4E3562&Options=info|&Search=
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