We have created a learner guide for today's session, as we do for our webinars, as a way for you to take next steps with your learning.

This is a great tool for you to use to bring the conversation to your team, to your board, perhaps.

Know that you can customize the guide to adjust it based on the questions you'd like to focus on, but this is a tool for you to take those next steps.

All right, I'm going to go ahead and get our recording started here and welcome our guests.

We're so thrilled to have Mark Fink, who is the county librarian and chief archivist at the Yolo County Library in California.

And Peter Bromberg is now the associate Director at EveryLibrary and also more recently at the Salt Lake City -- Peter, maybe you better.

I may say the wrong thing.

>> Peter: Salt Lake City Public Library.

>> Jennifer: There we go.

Excellent.

Welcome to both of you.

We're going to have Mark get us started.

Mark, I'm going to pass the ball on over to you and have you dive into this important content.

And we're so glad all of you are here.

Welcome, Mark.

>> Mark: Thank you.

I just want to make sure everybody can hear me all right.

>> Jennifer: Yep, and we can see you, for those of you who are WebJunction webinar folks.

We're excited to be testing the video today.

So thank you so much to Mark and Peter for being our guinea pigs.

>> Mark: All right.

Well, first I just want to provide a little context.

I am the county librarian and chief archivist for the Yolo County Library.

Yolo County sits next to Sacramento County in California.

We're about 60 minutes from San Francisco, and we serve a population of about 160,000 people.

The county is about 1,000 square miles in size, and most of our population lives in suburban and rural communities in the county.

Yolo County Library has eight branches.

So really, today we're talking about the elimination of late fines and why that's important, and we're going to provide you with some strategies on that.

So really, the first question to address is why do this.

ALA has provided a really great, clear reason why this is something that all libraries should look at.

Back in 2019, they adopted a resolution on monetary late fines as a form of social inequity.

Essentially, monetary late fines create a barrier to the provision of library and information services.

ALA also urged libraries to look for other ways of replacing that revenue that's generated by late fines and also encourage libraries when they're able to, to eliminate late fines altogether.

So we're going to provide you with some strategies today on how to become fine free.

Let's see, okay.

So when we're talking about fines and fees, just so we're all on the same page and have a common understanding of what we're talking about, really we're focused on this idea that fines are a punishment for violating a municipal system or state law, usually for a minor infraction, such as an overdue library book or running a red light.

Fines are also referred to by government jurisdictions as overdue fines, extended-use fees, and late fees.

I think the key message here that we're looking at is that if you return an item late, you are being punished and charged a fine as a result.

So that punishment factor is what we're trying to do away with.

Oops, oh, here we go.

So what I'd like to do is talk to you a little bit about our experience in Yolo County and how we were able to go fine free.

As I mentioned, we are a suburban and rural county, and we were looking at going fine free, but we understood for our jurisdiction, we really needed to take a gradual approach and implement several kind of smaller, incremental solutions before we were able to get final approval to eliminate all of our fines.

So I'm going to give you some tips today on how you can start gradually by clearing the path and working through these strategies to go fine free.

And one of the primary reasons, especially when it comes to equity, to go fine free is to really let your patrons know that you care about them.

This here is a welcome mat.

What you really want to do is if you're really wanting all of your residents to be able to take advantage of library services, going fine free is putting out a welcome mat or extending an invitation to all of your patrons so they can take advantage of library services.

And one of the things that we found in Yolo County, especially with our rural communities, libraries are community living rooms.

So people use our libraries not just to borrow materials, but they also go there to socialize, connect with neighbors.

They go for advice.

They go to attend book clubs.

They go for early literacy.

They go for homework help.

Really, in these small communities, our libraries serve as the living rooms for the community, and because of that, we want to make sure that we welcome everyone in and we eliminate as many barriers as possible to providing them with service.

So I'm going to walk through some of the strategies that we've used.

The first thing, really, is to identify your audience.

The reason why this is so important is because you need to know who your audience is, and then you'll be able to tailor your message accordingly.

So some of your audiences may include your staff, governing board, patrons, taxpayers, and friends and foundations.

And again, after you identify your audience, then you can really tailor your message and strategy to your audience.

So for example, when you start having the conversation with staff about eliminating fines, you can really talk to them about, you know, how it can decrease workload.

It can result in a lot less cash handling, and it can also mean that staff don't have to have difficult conversations with patrons when their accounts are blocked because they have too many fines on their accounts.

Then you might have a completely different conversation about -- 

with taxpayers about how every taxpayer can take advantage of a library service because you've done everything you can to eliminate barriers so that folks can do that.

Peter is going to talk more about some of the messaging and strategies, and I'll be kind of walking you through some of the ideas that we've implemented to get to the point where you can go fine free.

So after you've identified your audience, then it's really important to analyze your community.

One of the things that we did in Yolo County was we looked at household income by zip code.

It was an opportunity for us to review patron accounts and compare it to household income by zip code.

A great resource for this is the American Community Survey, which is run by the U.S. Census Bureau.

It provides information about demographic, economic, housing, and social status of folks that live in the United States.

And here are the results in Yolo County.

We found that three of the zip codes in the county that had the lowest household incomes, they were -- our level of fines that we had in these zip codes, there was a disproportionate impact.

One of the zip codes in West Sacramento, these are three of the five zip codes in Yolo County with the lowest household income.

What we see is these three zip codes make up 8.2% of all of our library accounts, but they represent 9.8% of all library accounts with fines.

And then when you look at the same numbers for all library accounts, although it's only 8.2% of all library accounts, it represents 14.3% of all blocked library accounts.

Then if you look at our adult library accounts, these three zip codes make up a little over 7%, and the disproportionate impact is even more evident here because it represents almost 14% of all blocked accounts.

So you can see that in these three zip codes with the lowest household incomes, there's really a significant economic impact of local residents being able to continue to pay their fines.

So this is really a great motivator for looking for ways to eliminate fines.

So what I'm going to do now is provide five strategies that you can use to go down that path, you know, really clear that path and make the way so you can go completely fine free.

So the first strategy that you can look at implementing is automatic renewals.

Automatic renewals is really the ability to automate the renewal process for items.

This is something that many integrated library systems offer.

So one of the things that you can do is decide how many times you want an automatic renewal to go into place.

You may decide that three automatic renewals is enough, or some libraries go all the way up to ten automatic renewals.

The thing with an automatic renewal system is it extends the borrowing period for a patron, and they don't have to do anything to take advantage of that.

And if an item -- if a hold is placed on an item, then a patron is not able to have an automatic renewal take place.

Another thing to think about, too, is if an item is not able to be renewed, that you communicate with the patron either by email or text or phone with a request to return the items.

So there are really two elements here that are important.

One is the extending the borrowing period for that item.

Then when that period ends, make sure that you communicate in some way so the patron has an opportunity to bring the item back and not incur a fine.

If your ILS does not offer an automatic renewal feature, a couple other strategies you may consider are increasing the number of holds -- or excuse me, increasing the number of renewals that a patron can place on the items that they have.

So they have to do that themselves, but if they need the item and there aren't any holds on it, it gives them a longer period to borrow that item.

Another thing that you can do is also look at extending the amount of time for borrowing an item.

In Yolo County, we found that during COVID, we really needed to extend the amount of time people borrowed our items.

That actually was beneficial to our staff and to patrons.

So we -- our borrowing period increased to six weeks for most items during the pandemic.

So for the next strategy, one of the things that you can look at doing is offering a fine amnesty event.

So this is a defined period of time when you invite patrons to return their late items, and you waive their fines on those items.

Here I've provided an example from San Francisco Public Library.

Some of the notable statistics that they reported, they had 10,000 people who had fines forgiven.

The dollar amount of those fines that were forgiven, it was almost $330,000.

What's significant here is to note that even though that sounds like a lot of money, there were almost 700,000 items returned.

And this meant that San Francisco Public Library had 700,000 more items that they were able to add back in their collection and make available to other patrons.

It's also worth noting one item was more than 100 years past due.

So offering a fine amnesty event is a great way to let people return materials and not have fines accrue on their accounts.

For the third idea, you can look at doing a food for fines event.

In Yolo County, this is something we do in November around Thanksgiving.

So in the graphic here, you can see that the Public Library offers a food for fines week from June 19th to the 24th.

This is an opportunity for a library to collect canned food, and that canned food gets donated to the local food bank.

It's also an opportunity for people to have late fees waived from their accounts.

So in Fairfax County, Virginia, for each donated item, $1 was removed from their fines for a maximum of $15 in fine forgiveness.

This resulted in 12,000 pounds of food being donated to non-profit.

So this is a fantastic way for a library to facilitate providing food for those who need it and benefitting local patrons who are generous and make donations.

As far as the next idea to get started, offer a read off your fines event.

In Yolo County, we're offering this option for adults to be able to read off their fines.

So for every hour or every book they read, they can get $1 off on their fines up to a total of $10.

The example that I've provided here for Los Angeles County, card holders under the age of 21 can read fines, you know, for every hour they spend reading, they can get $5 in fines waived from their account.

So this is a great way to motivate people to read more, and they benefit by reducing the amount of fines on their accounts.

And another suggestion, and this is something that we did in Yolo County, start by eliminating late fines for youth.

So instead of looking at going fine free for everyone, do it gradually.

This strategy is summed up really well by the library director from the Grand Rapids Public Library.

He notes that 75% of local school graders are not proficient in reading.

So by eliminating overdue fines for children, it acts as a way to keep books in homes and get children to develop a daily reading habit.

So what are the things you want to do while you're in the process of clearing that path to go fine free?

Monitor and measure your results.

One of the things you want to do ahead of time is understand what you want to measure.

Some questions to ask could include, you know, did borrowing increase and for whom?

Did account registration or renewal increase?

For whom?

Was there an increase in the return of late items?

So these are just some of the --

these are some of the metrics that Yolo County used when we were looking at this process, but you may find some other metrics that you want to follow.

So one of the things that I want to share with you is that in Yolo County, I mentioned that we eliminated late fines for youth in January 2019.

We did this in concert with a an effort to provide all of our students in one of our school districts with public library cards tied to their student ID numbers.

However, since we had quite a few students that already had library cards and already had fines or some accounts that were blocked, one of the things that we did as we rolled out this program was we eliminated late fines for youth and also cleared all the debt on their accounts.

Then we measured the results.

We saw a 28% increase in borrowing on youth accounts, and you can see here that in June of 2018 for children's materials, we had about 26,000 items borrowed.

Then you can see the results a year later.

Very successful metric for us to report.

We saw an increase of almost 240,000 items being borrowed by -- those were children's items.

Then almost 30,000 young adult items.

We also recorded that in that school district, 42% of the public library cards that we had issued to the students, 42% of students had used their cards within the first six months of us being able to implement the program.

So we had a lot of success with this program, and it really set the stage for us to be able to go fine free.

So we took our request to the board of supervisors in March of this year.

We were able to eliminate late fees for everyone starting April 1st.

For adults that still had late fees on their accounts, we're offering a read off your fines program for our summer reading program.

So really, what I've done is just shared five ideas with you that can help you clear the path.

Really, the idea behind clearing the path is by laying out the welcome mat and letting everybody in your community know that you really want them to be able to take advantage of services and that you're doing everything you can to reduce the barrier so they can borrow materials from your library.

So now you're ready.

With that, I'm going to turn it over to Peter, but I'm going to share my contact information here really quickly.

>> Jennifer: Yeah, and I'm going to jump in really quick with a few comments and some interesting additional approaches.

There were some folks, when you were talking about the food for fines, one person said they recently implemented a perpetual food for fines payment program that supports their student food pantry on campus.

Then that was followed by someone saying that they've tried food for fines with little success, that most of the donated food items were expired.

So this shows us the range of experiences that folks can have.

There were a couple interesting alternatives that I just want to point out in terms of fines for kids.

 One library has two different options for under 18.

One is a 25-item checkout limit with fines.

So folks could get more items with the knowledge that they would get charged fines for those being overdue.

Or six items to check out without fines.

They call that the reading pass.

They said that's the far more popular program.

So an interesting approach.

Also, someone pointed out, and I've heard this before, they have a special children's card for 6 and under that does not accrue fines.

They all are still charged for lost or damaged items.

So I thought those were some interesting different experiences out there as well.

>> Mark: And I would just add, you know, that's why it's so important to really understand who your audience is and analyze your community.

You know, every strategy isn't going to work for every community.

So really understanding, you know, who's in your community and what their priorities are and really tailoring your strategy so that it meets those expectations of your community.

So I love those additional ideas.

Thank you.

>> Jennifer: Absolutely.

And I just want to point out that Mark has shared some additional resources that are posted to the event page.

The presentation he gave to the board around eliminating fines altogether and a report to staff on that process and decision as well.

So thank you so much, Mark, and we'll be sure and circle back around with any additional questions.

For now, let's pass it on over to Peter.

Thanks so much, Peter, for being here.

>> Peter: All right.

Well, I am just really pleased to be here with you all this afternoon, and thank you, Jennifer and Kendra and everyone at the WebJunction team for inviting me.

Also, you guys are just total pros.

Such a pleasure to work with.

And Mark, it's been great getting to know you and working with you on this.

You just shared some great data and metrics and great proven ideas on how to take a phased approach.

So I hope to supplement and build on what Mark has just shared.

I especially want to share with everyone who's in attendance today for considering this shift, this is something I care about and believe in very, very deeply.

All right, so for starters, preparing the way.

Mark talked a little bit about this, but you need to talk to people, right.

And one thing I want top say is don't feel like you need to log off of this webinar and tomorrow like, you know, go fine free.

Invest the time if you haven't already started by having conversations with your key stakeholders.

That does include, of course, staff and council, board, whomever they are in your community.

Start to help to get people used to the idea because people have such a mental model of libraries and fines, right.

So it's getting that idea out there and gathering some initial feedback.

One approach that I took that seemed to work well was really whatever conversation I was having with someone in the community, our elected official, board member, staff member, at the end of the conversation I go, oh, thanks, great to talk to you.

You know, there's just one more thing.

It was like Columbo.

Just one more thing.

I've been thinking about this fines idea, and I'd start kind of throwing out different ideas or arguments about why we might want to get rid of fines and sort of seeing what -- you know, read body language and responses.

So I also felt like Johnny Appleseed, just throwing these seeds out there in conversations over time.

I was getting really good feedback from people about, oh, that makes sense, or that doesn't resonate.

You might want to phrase it that way.

But it paved the way and built support over time.

So I would recommend really investing the time to have those conversations and build or strengthen those relationships.

So workshopping the material.

You know how comedians, before they do their big Netflix show, they're out in the small clubs.

They may even come to your town, whatever your comedy club is.

They're practicing the material.

They're practicing, seeing what works in all these different audiences.

They're really seeing what works for everybody.

Maybe it worked in Peoria, but it didn't work in Paducah.

So go out on the road, as it were, and talk to people and practice your arguments and practice your talking points.

Talk to your electeds, your board, your community leaders that you have good relationships with first, right.

So you have that safe audience.

You know they may be friendly.

Start with them, and over time see what materials are working.

What arguments are resonating and with whom because you're going to notice -- and we'll talk more about this later -- 

certain arguments will resonate more or less with different audiences.

Mark also pointed that out, the importance of knowing your audience.

Then you can be refining these points continually.

Then after, you know, two, three months, you're ready for your big Netflix special.

That might be a board presentation.

That might be a staff presentation, a presentation to city council, a town hall with your community.

But you're going to find that you're going to actually get really good advice and feedback from the people you're practicing with.

Just keep refining and revising that message.

By the time comes to deliver that message more publicly and formally, it's like that -- you have your material down, you know your pauses, your laugh lines.

Really, that's the experience when you approach it that way and practice.

And of course, we want to root this in values.

Mark chose the welcome mat.

A different metaphor, this is representing our core values, right, as an institution, of being welcoming to all.

The first law of library science, books are for use.

Why do we want books out there?

It's a values based decision.

Books are for use.

And fines are a barrier to use, right?

We know that.

They're not just a barrier, which would be bad enough, but they're an inequitable barrier.

We know that they're hitting those the hardest who arguably need us the most to just supplement and affirm the statistics that Mark was sharing.

At Salt Lake City Public Library, our three branches that serve predominantly lower-income represented 14% of our circulation, but 32% of our blocked cards.

You'll notice the same statistic keeps showing up, every library that's looking at it.

You can almost double it, right.

Regardless of how many card holders, our patrons who are less well off, they're getting their cards blocked at a rate that's usually close to double.

It's just true everywhere it's been looked at.

So there are more values besides access and equity, but those are our core values.

We're going to talk a little bit more when we get into objections, about people are going to raise other values.

We always want to affirm when someone else raises a value argue, but we can always come back to our core value, equitable access.

That kind of has to take precedence for us, right, when we're trying to balance those things.

So let's talk reality.

Here's a quote.

I had it on the first slide, too.

This is a real quote.

This is a quote from a woman who was a Lyft driver in Atlanta, Georgia, when I was there for a conference a few years ago.

You know, I don't know if you do this, but I always like to tell the taxi drivers, Lyft drivers, whomever, I'm in town for the library conference, just to see what their reaction is, right.

It's either, oh, they still have libraries, or oh, I love my library.

So my Lyft driver, we were chatting and I said, yeah, I'm in town for the library conference.

She lights up like, oh, I love -- I grew up walking distance to this Atlanta branch of the library.

We were always there, we lived there, we love it.

Pause.

I don't let my kids go to the library, though.

I said, what?

I said, how old are your kids?

She said 7, 11, and 15.

I said why don't you let your kids go to the library?

She says it's because of those -- and she's looking for the term -- those deadlines that you have.

She says it's like having to pay another credit card bill at the end of every month that I can't afford.

Now, that's one story that I heard.

You, I guarantee, have these stories in your own community.

In fact, I was at a neighbor's barbecue literally saying I'm the library director and we're thinking about getting rid of fines.

Immediately all these people said, oh, I stopped going to the library because of fines.

The stories just come out.

So I have no reason to suspect this isn't true for you and that you can't find your own stories.

And this carries a lot of weight when you tell it.

Another reality-based fact is that fines just don't do what we think they do.

I.E., the argument, I guess, behind fines originally is people won't return materials on time unless we charge them.

So it's this way of getting materials back on time.

Well, this has also been studied.

It's just not true.

It's not the effect.

It doesn't mean that fines don't have an effect.

In fact, they do, and that effect is creating a barrier to use.

Again, hitting those hardest who can least afford it.

It's really setting up kids and families to not be productive, contributing members of our community, right?

We're blocking them from using the library.

Especially the kids, of course, who really, you know, are -- 

don't necessarily have any control over this.

So here's a little more reality.

Parents and caregivers in poor families may make a rational decision to not allow their children to get a library card.

That's Shandra's story right there.

As a mother, someone trying to make ends meet, is making a fully rational decision not to allow their kids to get library cards.

We want to change that landscape so it's not a rational decision to prevent your kids from getting a library card or using the library.

That's not what we want to do.

Okay, so let's talk a little bit about money.

Money, money, money, money.

Actually, I'm going to go back, if I can figure out how to do that.

Here we go.

Fine revenue is generally speaking a rounding error in our budgets.

In Salt Lake City, it was one-third of 1% of our budget.

Your mileage may differ, of course.

But it's likely to not be a significant portion of your budget.

If it is a significant portion of your budget, that's problematic in another more structural way.

We really should not be using fines to fund operations.

It is not sound fiscal practice, and I will come back to visit that in a moment.

But it's also cost neutral.

It doesn't mean it's revenue neutral, but it's cost neutral.

Libraries that have looked at this -- and when you go to the WebJunction page, there's a lot of resources, documents that will give you the deets on this.

But the cost of collecting fines and tracking fines and all of that really is just more expensive than the money you're bringing in.

So that money takes some time, but really it's a cost-neutral decision ultimately to give up that money.

Again, it's not revenue neutral, certainly not in the short term.

So here's just another quote, right.

This is from High Plains Library District.

It becomes clear charging fines for revenue may not make sense.

And all these quotes are in documents you'll have access to through the WebJunction site.

If I'm not reading them all, don't fret.

Vernon Area Library in Illinois.

The cost of staff time to handle overdue fines and of processing the amounts to more than what we're earning back for patrons.

It's kind of variations on a theme.

Here's Stark County, Ohio.

It costs more money in staff time to penalize the customers.

So these are libraries that have studied this.

Now, this I want to go outside of libraries for a moment.

Mark had begun with that resolution from ALA that kind of started to raise this ethical issue and the equity issue.

This is from the Government Finance Officer's Association.

It says a local government's revenue system needs to treat people fairly to maintain the public trust.

So the GFOA's code of ethics requires that finance officers support equitable provision of services.

But some local governments use and rely on revenue from imposed fees and fines that make socioeconomic and racial inequities worse.

And we know this is what late fees and fines are doing in libraries.

They are making socioeconomic and racial inequities worse.

We know it, right.

We have the data.

It's not a guess.

And the GFOA also has on their website a section that's called "are your financial policies ethical?"

And they note that fines and imposed fees should not be used as revenue raising, right, or cost recovery tools.

Using them in this way can worsen problems that government services are meant to solve.

Libraries are meant to solve certain problems, provide certain services, improve the quality of people's lives.

By building budgets around fines and fees to the extent we're doing it, we're worsening the problems that we actually are, you know, built to solve.

So that all sounded very kind of pedantic and heated.

I guess because that's how I feel about it.

But it's not just how I feel about it.

There's the facts.

So let's talk customer experience.

We all know this, it's kind of preaching to the choir, I expect.

It's a negative customer experience, right?

 If we do a word association with libraries, you say library and the person responds, they'll say book.

That's usually number one.

Fines are like the second thing that people associate with libraries after books.

It's a highly negative association.

It keeps people away.

It creates this background hum of negativity.

You know, in popular culture, everything from Seinfeld to party Girl or wherever we are in the media, there's always jokes about fines and fees.

It's in our shared collective unconscious there, but it's just amazing how many stories I've heard and I suspect you have too about I stopped going to the library because, right?

It is just the most negative interaction, even if it's not that they couldn't afford the fine.

Just having the negative interaction was enough.

As far as staff, employee morale and time, collecting fines is just a negative experience for staff.

It's the most negative public interaction we have.

And we have our staff spending tens of hours per month or more on this activity that adds no value in regards to our mission.

It's not like we're putting on a story time that's building literacy or doing a civic engagement that's building, you know, cultural competence or understanding or civic involvement.

It does none of those things.

It does not support the important outcomes that we are trying to create for our communities.

In fact, we're funded through tax money to create for our communities, right?

Knowledge, health, economic success.

That's why we exist, and having staff spend time on this is not only negative for them, but it's taking them away from doing other things that could contribute to creating knowledge, health, and economic success outcomes for those in our community.

It's just time that could be redirected more effectively.

Ah, so concerns and objections.

Yes, yes, yes.

Okay, I'm going to go through the big ones.

One of the biggest ones is we have to teach responsibility.

Now, this often comes from outside of the library, but it can also come from inside.

It could be staff members, could be a director.

And responsibility is one of those -- it's a value, right.

Being responsible is a value.

It absolutely is.

But is that the value we're really positioned to be teaching, right?

So how I've responded to this is acknowledge responsibility is a very important value.

It's not the library's core value.

Our core value is learning and connection and literacy.

And point two is that, you know, I'm really sensitive to the fact that the library, although you might not think of it this way, is a government agency.

We are an arm of the government.

We're an agent of the government, and I'm really not comfortable with government agencies dictating like moral values like responsibility or being positioned to teach moral values to kids that really, that's the role of parents and faith-based church, temple.

You know, that's really where moral values should be happening and being taught.

So I as a director or agent of the government, I don't want to be stepping on those toes.

I don't want to be usurping the parent's responsibilities.

If the parents want to teach responsibility around library books, they can do that without us charging fines.

And the last point that I would make, because we would still continue to charge for lost items, is oh, and by the way, we are still going to hold people responsible.

If it doesn't come back at some point, there will be a bill.

That could lead to a blocked card.

But there will be lots of opportunities.

We also put automatic renewals in place and all the additional messages, et cetera.

So in my experience of talking to probably 30 or more community groups around this, when the responsibility issue came up, and it always did, as I went through, acknowledged that's a value, not our core value, parents and church should be dealing with, not the government, and we'll still hold people responsibility, all the heads were nodding in agreement.

It was a really effective approach to taking the teeth out of that one.

The second objection is, well, the books won't come back if you don't charge fines.

The short answer to that is, yes, they will.

I mean, PS, here's the data.

There's a lot of it.

I have a drop box folder that's linked from the WebJunction site that's got so many reports, data, research.

It's all in there, as well as the actual report I wrote up for my board to make the argument to go fine free.

It's all there.

But the short answer is, yep, books will absolutely come back.

I actually have the Salt Lake City Public Library data to show that along with other data.

The next one is hold times are going to go up.

They're going to hold on to these books and not return them.

People are already waiting.

What's interesting about this is they actually don't go up by much, if at all.

If they do go up, it's because more people are using the library and checking out the books and the materials, which is not because they aren't returning them.

That's a good thing.

If you go fine free and usage jumps by more than 12%, well, that's great.

That's ROI.

That's return on investment because we didn't spend any more on our collection, but it's being used more.

So we saw like a slight tweak from like 9.4 days of wait to 9.6 days.

Super small, and again, most libraries don't see any significant increase there.

So those are the main objections that I heard come up.

Oops, and there's a slide that had all that on there.

When you go to the slides later, that's all spelled out for you.

>> Jennifer: You also have the whole wait times piece in there too.

>> Peter: Yeah, I was trying to advance the slide.

Okay, apologies if I lost sync with my slides.

Can you tell I'm kind of passionate about this?

So the results are in, meaning libraries have been going fine free now for -- there's certainly been a wave of it for a few years.

So there's a lot of experience.

We don't have to just make best guesses.

We know, we know, we have the results, right.

This is just Salt Lake City, but it's really in alignment with what other libraries had found.

More stuff was coming back, right.

In fact -- and remember, we also went to auto renewal.

I think we did three auto renewals as well, at the same time.

By doing fine free and auto renewal simultaneously, we found when books were returned, only 3% of them were late.

You could still have something be late if a book is on hold and it needs to come back, right.

Or if you've exceeded your three automatic renewals.

So previous to that, we were over 10% of late.

So we cut our late returns by two-thirds there.

In terms of revenue and ROI, you know, it was less than a third of a percent of our budget, and we increased circulation by 11%.

We increased our borrowers by 11%.

We increased new card registrations by over 4%.

Again, disproportionately, this was happening on the west side, which was the lower-income area.

So people were coming back to the library after they had stopped going because they couldn't afford it anymore.

Our hold wait times again held steady.

And this is just consistently true for libraries beyond us.

As far as making it happen, right, so all politics, of course, are local, which means that who gets the fine money?

Do you get it?

Some libraries don't even get the fine money.

The county gets it and is building it into their budget.

That's a different political discussion.

But it is important and useful to separate out the discussion of fines and lost charges.

I know we did and a lot of libraries lump that all into one line, but it really helps to be able to tell the story and do the analysis to say, well, those are lost charges or damaged charges, but these are the fines we're talking about.

Let's focus on those when we're doing our numbers analysis.

Again, have those small conversations, learn the concerns in your community and the specific concerns of who the decision makers or the thought leaders are so you can respond to them and get them on board.

Then determine what's possible, right.

It might be possible for you to just go all in and say, all right, we're getting rid of fines, forgiving everything on the books, getting rid of lost charges or whatever.

But in many cases, I imagine if it was that easy, many of you would have done that already.

So there are going to be some different constraints, and we have to do that analysis of what's possible, but we have those conversations and we get agreement on the principles and values.

Having access for our kids, self-determination, you know, for entrepreneurs to be able to come in and lift themselves up by their boot straps.

Then it's just the art of the possible.

Once we have agreement on that this is the right thing to do, then the conversation is really about how do we get there and what speed.

Mark gave all those different ways that you can potentially start phasing this in.

Maybe you only start with kids.

Maybe you start as a pilot.

All those great suggestions that Mark had shared.

And those are all proven examples, right.

They're all things that have worked successfully somewhere.

So coming back in, Mark said you've got to know your audience and tailor your message.

Absolutely.

What this slide really represents is kind of a pro tip about knowing your audience and really just offering you three frames of political world views that will really kind of act as lenses of how people will listen to messages because it's sort of the -- the world view that we have is the language we use.

So the progressive world view is speaking to equity and access.

Not all but many, if not most, libraries, we sort of default to the progressive message, which is all lovely if we're talking to other progressives, but the danger there is that we might only speak that message, right.

We're going to default to it and think, well, that's the message that's going to carry the day, and we'll just say, oh, you know, it's an equity thing.

Members of the community are being left out, and we want them to have equitable access.

We do need to have that message, but we can't have only that message.

There are going to be libertarians in that audience, too, and our libertarian friends and family and neighbors really are looking at a world view of self-direction and gumption and really wanting to have low barriers to people to do the thing, whatever we want to do, right.

So we speak about giving people the chance to self-direct and the lack of drain on future government resources.

So this idea of, well, when we put fines in place, the kids might not be able to come to the library and develop those vocabulary skills and have that academic success throughout life that's going to lead them to be, you know, effective members of our local community.

We don't want them when they're graduating high school to go on unemployment or welfare or food stamps.

That's going to be a drain.

We want to position them for success so that they can by the own sweat of their brow and self-direction and gumption lift themselves up.

Entrepreneurs who want to start their own businesses.

So those are the kinds of messages we really want to talk about with libertarians.

Again, the library fundamentally is that one place in the civic landscape, right, that anyone can come in and we don't judge you.

We meet you where you're at.

Who are you, what do you care about, what do you want to read, what do you want to think, what do you want to learn.

We don't judge that, we're just here to support you.

Libertarians really resonate with that message.

Then thirdly, there's people who have a conservative framework.

That's really speaking to shared culture and heritage, that there's something noble about the values and character of our community that needs to be preserved and extended and celebrated.

We can talk about how the library is that central part of the community, right.

New arrivals and refugees come to learn about our culture, to learn about what does it mean to be an American or what does it mean to be a member of our community.

The library often holds our local history and shared cultural knowledge, and we don't want to put up a barrier because someone has just arrived on our shores and may not know what a public library is then they quickly build up a $10 fine and their card is blocked and they're not coming back.

They already maybe have a negative association with anything governmental and it might take them some time to understand the library is a different kind of government.

So just keep those three mind sets and frameworks in mind when you're messaging.

So you might need a bridge.

You might need bridge budget years to make this happen, right.

If it's already built into your budget for next year, you know, even if it's a small percentage, it still might create a hole that needs to be addressed.

Fundamentally, we believe that eliminating fines is the right thing to do, the moral, ethical, value-based, mission-driven decision that's going to help us make a difference in people's lives, then we have to be bold enough to rewrite our budget based on that moral decision.

Money only comes from a few places.

Four, as far as I can tell.

Maybe I'm missing some.

We can cut something else in our budget.

We can reallocate.

We can find outside sources of soft money -- grants.

Some of that soft money floating around out there right now in terms of COVID money that could potentially be used.

Grants from your state libraries.

Even when you drive down the highway and it's like this stretch of highway is being cleaned up by, you know, whatever, Bob's chicken place.

We can get people in our community, perhaps say, hey, would you like to underwrite six months or a year of fine free as an experiment?

Maybe it gives us time to bridge that next year or two where we can find other ways to patch that in our budget.

In Salt Lake City, we launched a passport office.

Not everyone can do that.

It wasn't part of the deal.

It was sort of after, but that passport office actually generated enough money to make up for that lost revenue.

And Mark discussed other great ideas you can use to employ this gradual approach here.

So with that, I'll just say thank you.

This Google link is really just to a Dropbox of information linked from your WebJunction.

I really encourage you to check it out.

There's a lot of resources, both in the Dropbox I put together and the larger WebJunction site.

Again, lots of research, lots of data.

The recommendation that I wrote up for my board, which I've had a number of library directors say they just changed a couple words and that was it.

Their work was done.

So yay, you know, use it if it's helpful.

Also, feel free to reach out to me directly.

I'm always happy to talk personally, pro bono, make time to talk strategy, messages, any way I can be of help to you on this journey.

Thanks so much.

>> Jennifer: Fantastic.

Thanks so much, Peter, and Mark as well.

There have been some wonderful conversation and questions shared in chat.

I'd like to just touch on a few of those.

A lot of the earlier questions, I know you all addressed a little later.

So hopefully folks feel like those concerns have been addressed.

Let's see.

I thought this was an interesting comment.

We do have some patrons that are so happy to pay a fine.

They say they love the library so much that they are happy to pay.

I wonder, Peter, if you have a good -- I mean, I heard your underwriting suggestion, but what could somebody say in response to the community that says we like paying fines, we're happy to pay them?

>> Peter: Yeah, so I'm going the -- I can answer that, but I'm going to do the teacher thing.

I'm going to invite people to answer that in the chat.

The fact there's one person in your community, or maybe more than one that, says I like paying, I don't mind paying, that's great.

But there's large percentages of people who are unable to pay, and they're being completely disenfranchised.

The library, by the way, is tax money either through mortgage payment or rent.

Tax money is built in there to the rent.

So they're paying for the library, but they're disenfranchised from using it.

So the response would be, that's so wonderful, here's the reasons we're considering eliminating these fines.

If you would still like to contribute to our friends group or some libraries have done the guilt jar, the fines jar so it gives people that outlet.

I see a number of people talking about the fines jar.

That's how I would respond.

>> Jennifer: Yeah, and encourage them to donate if they wish.

Yeah, that's a great response.

Mark, do you have any additional thoughts on that?

>> Mark: I've just been following the chat.

There's so many great examples there.

I think for those folks that can pay fines, maybe changing the incentive, paying for fines, maybe they make donation to libraries or friends groups.

That was a really great suggestion.

Again, creating awareness around the broader community, I think, is a really great way.

It's a way to educate folks just about things they may not think about.

So those are two options I'd offer.

>> Jennifer: Excellent.

There were also a number of folks -- I appreciate the responses.

Someone asked, how do you allow patrons with lost or damaged items to check out materials?

Do you have a threshold for blocking borrow privileges? I think there was everything between $5 and $50 with some adjustments to how many items they could check out.

So be sure and check out chat if that was a question that you had.

There are a lot of great suggestions.

Let's see here.

I wonder -- I know that you both touched on some of the research that talks about -- somebody asked is there any empirical evidence showing libraries actually save money because they don't have to purchase as many replacement items?

I think you both mentioned some of that in your own stories.

Peter, let's start with you.

>> Peter: Yeah, I didn't do that financial analysis because others have done it.

Again, it's somewhere in my Dropbox there.

 A number of people have studied this.

Again, you can't look at it as saving money per se.

You can look at it as how many hours does it take.

Libraries have tracked it hourly.

How many hours does it take not just for your front-line staff?

Actually, my finance director, who's a fiscally conservative fellow, was talking about how much time for him and his staff it took just on the back end of it.

So you start to get in the finance office all of that.

You look at how much you're making, and you can just multiply the hourly rates by the hours and see it's actually costing us more.

Now, if you dispense with fines, that doesn't mean you then immediately recoup that in money, but you recoup it in time, which can then be redirected to more higher-impact activities.

And maybe over time there's some attrition.

That's not necessarily the message I would lead with.

Like hey, staff, we can fire one of you in a year.

I don't know of any library that's actually done that.

But again, it's looking at, you know, we're going to save this time so it can be redirected towards more impactful outcomes for the community.

>> Jennifer: Excellent.

Mark, any thoughts on that?

>> Mark: Just really tangible evidence.

So for our library system for a really long time, our libraries, we didn't have a way for our libraries to accept credit card payments.

So if somebody wanted to pay a fine, you know, by credit card, they had to call our finance officer and have the transaction handled over the phone.

You can imagine how expensive that gets for every credit card transaction.

We were able to move to an online payment system through our website, which helped a lot, but just the amount of staffing required to process patron payments was -- it prevented our staff from being able to do a lot of other things.

So for us, some real-world experiences, instead of having two people work at a circ desk, we were able to reduce it to one.

Then we were able to have another person offer support for our program, things like that.

Also, for some of our rural branches, when you only have one or two staff people in the branch, they're spending a lot of time accepting payments.

It really prevents them from interacting with patrons and offering programs and things like that.

Again, I think another thing to look at is setting a threshold that makes sense for your library as far as lost and damaged items and when a card gets blocked.

I think that's going to vary by community.

There were some great comments in the chat about accepting replacement items instead of billing a patron for the cost of a new item.

I think you need to look at those options and what works best for your community.

>> Jennifer: Thanks for mentioning that, Mark.

I did see lots of great ideas.

Someone asked the question about whether or not people are charging processing fees.

So look at different ways to -- 

even naming conventions seem to make a difference in terms of how patrons understand what those fees related to replacement items are.

>> Peter: Yeah, I just want to make a -- I know we're right at 2:00 here.

If a patron comes in, they know they've lost an item and have got to bill for it and they come in with a book and say I got this bill, but here, I bought one and want to -- I know a lot of libraries will say, sorry, we don't accept that or we accept it but, you know, we're going to charge as processing fee or you don't understand and here's the whole 37 steps that goes into adding a book to our collection.

I would really encourage, if we have a patron that has taken the time to go out and buy that book, take it and say thank you very much for your thoughtfulness.

We really appreciate it.

And clear the fine.

This is our best patron that we could hope for, someone who's thoughtful.

So just thank them.

Yes, maybe we'll put that in the book sale.

Maybe we don't add it to the collection, or maybe we do.

They made a good effort, and is it worth destroying or harming that relationship?

I'll just -- I'll get off my soapbox now.

>> Jennifer: That's fantastic.

What a wonderful to wrap up.

Thank you, both, so much.

I encourage everyone to take a further look at all the resources.

There's a wonderful lig guide from the Delaware State Library with a number of b guide from the Delaware State Library with a number of resources, as well as Peter's Dropbox and other things to explore.

To all of you on this journey, your communities thank you ultimately.

I know it's tricky and difficult, but your communities thank you for doing that work as well.

And thank you so much to Peter and Mark for bringing your experiences to this webinar and our captioner today.

I'll send you all a link later on once the recording is posted.

I'll also automatically send you all a certificate for attending today.

Then I'll also send you, at this moment, when we shut down this session to a short survey.

We love to collect your feedback.

It helps us guide our ongoing programming, and it also -- we share that with the presenters as well.

So thank you so much for taking the time, and Peter and Mark, thank you again and have a wonderful rest of your week.

>> Peter: Thanks, great to be with y'all.

Take care.

>> Mark: Yes, thank you.