Coun. Colleen Jordan had a number of critiques of Burnaby’s proposed 2020 budget, but one change she spoke in favour of was a plan to eliminate late fees for library books.
According to an internal memo, cancelling overdue fees at Burnaby Public Library will mean an estimated $165,000 loss to the city’s revenues.
“Small thing – $165,000 – and that will be great,” Jordan said. “So congratulations for bringing that forward.”
Part of the issue was hearing from the public that the fees have been a barrier to using the library, said chief librarian Beth Davies.
“It’s not so much that people have massive fines; it’s that fear of incurring fines,” Davies said.
Currently, the library has fines of 30 cents a day, and people can still take books out if their overdue fines total $10 or less, Davies said. And the library will, in some circumstances, sit down with someone who has a larger fine to talk about waiving it.
“But what we’re finding is that there’s a whole bunch of people who aren’t brave enough to come and talk to us in the first place and just stop using the library,” Davies said.
She said BPL has heard from people who have moved, or some other issue cause them to forget about their late books, and have incurred fines. Even if they don’t have an issue paying off the fine, she said some people might feel embarrassed about incurring the fine in the first place.
The city wouldn’t be the first to eliminate overdue fees at its libraries – Whistler, Sechelt and Pemberton have eliminated their late fees, as did Seattle recently, according to Davies.
In those libraries, she said, eliminating fees has not meant any significant increase in lost inventory. But it’s not necessarily expected to greatly increase library use, either, particularly as the library offers more e-books, which automatically become unavailable to the user after their allotted time.
Davies said it’s still too early to say what will happen to existing fines if the budget request were passed.
In all, BPL’s budget is $15.2 million, roughly 2.8% of the $511-million operating budget.
