Library dropping late fees

The Garland County Library’s holiday gift to the community will be waiving existing late fees, and eliminating the late fee policy, beginning Jan. 1 in an effort to encourage patrons with late fees to come back to the library.

“We were looking at our stats and we’ve got about 10,000 users who don’t use the library anymore because they have overdue fines on their accounts,” library Director Adam Webb said. “So

I mean that’s one out of every 10 people in the county. … This way it’s going to be a blank slate for everybody and hopefully, we’ll get some of those folks back because we want them back. … It’s been a rough year, so we’re trying to do what good we can.

“Additionally, Chicago Public Library, they’ve been the biggest one to do this and study it, and having that amnesty where if you return lost materials and you won’t have any overdue fines, got their community to return tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars of lost library materials back to the library. So for us, it’s about recouping our investment in our materials, too.”

Webb, who has wanted to transition to eliminating the policy since he started as executive director last October, said the late fees accumulated annually have been, historically, less than 1% of the library’s income. The library’s decision to pause late fees at the start of the pandemic in March allowed them to see a glimpse of the effect it would have before making the final decision.

“This whole year we have backdated all of our checkouts to before the pandemic, so we haven’t been ringing up any overdue fines to speak of since March. There’s kind of this growing movement among libraries in America to get rid of overdue fines, so we studied it here, and we realized the folks who don’t come and use the library anymore because they have overdue fines were the ones who need library services the most,” Webb said.

“So talking with folks in the community, talking with our peers around the state, we realized that our fine structure really was doing more damage to our community than it was helping the library, so we did some studies, looked at how we do things, and decided that starting in 2021 we were going to go fine free just to make the library an easier place to use for our citizens.

“We were looking at some of our patrons who have large overdue fees on their accounts; it’s almost always children books for early readers, and they’re working parents who have these fines, and it’s hard to get to the library to bring your stuff back when you’re working a job and you’re raising kids, so we’re just trying to make it easier for those folks,” he said.

“One of our colleagues,” Webb said, “was talking about how people who can pay fines, it doesn’t discourage bad behavior. … Folks who can easily pay overdue fines, it’s not going to make them bring things back any sooner because they’ll say ‘Oh, I’ll just bring it back when I can and just pay the fine.’”