SALINAS, Calif. -- In a quiet corner of the John Steinbeck Library reference room, Charles Wiseman looked up from the illustrated encyclopedia of insects he was studying and said that of course he had voted to keep this city's libraries open.
How, he wondered, could anyone have not?
Adriana Reyes, left, and Karina Almada, 9, read a children's book at the John Steinbeck Library, due to be closed as early as next month.
(Photos Marcio Jose Sanchez -- AP)
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"I don't know of any city in the county that doesn't have a library," said Wiseman, who visits Salinas's main library from a retirement complex a few times a week. "Even Gonzales has a library," he added, ticking off some of the region's smaller towns. "Even King City."
And yet, within weeks, this agricultural community of about 150,000 is expected to become not merely the only city in Monterey County but also the largest city in the nation with no public library.
City officials say that with a $9 million budget shortfall, they have no choice but to lay off all 33 library employees and shutter all three branches. Two ballot measures that would have provided last-minute funds to keep them open -- a half-cent sales tax increase and a new tax on the city's largest businesses -- were defeated in November.
Librarians across the country say Salinas serves as a warning of the perils facing all their institutions -- often the first to take the brunt of budget cuts -- especially in economically beleaguered areas where, they argue, libraries are needed the most.
"I don't want any libraries to close, but if the Beverly Hills library closed, people have other resources," said Michael Gorman of Fresno, president-elect of the American Library Association. "This is really hitting people who are already down."
But the closings may foreshadow a crippling of local services across California cities and towns, whose treasuries have been siphoned by a state government grappling with its own dire shortfalls. "I hope they can look at Salinas and really get the wake-up call," said Jan Neal, manager of the Steinbeck library.
Salinas's plight has drawn international attention because of a much-noted irony: The city that will soon go without libraries produced one of America's brightest literary lights, novelist and Nobel laureate John Steinbeck, whose odes to the working class, such as "The Grapes of Wrath," drew inspiration from the denizens of this fertile valley.
"Steinbeck himself said he couldn't have done it without city and county libraries," said Lauren Cercone, a member of the Friends of the Salinas Public Library. "It's a key tenet of American society that you can come [to a library] and better yourself."
Yet the crisis is also rooted in the fact that this city remains John Steinbeck's Salinas. While neighboring Monterey, setting of his novel "Cannery Row," has been transformed from a hardscrabble, sardine-packing village into a pricey tourist destination, Salinas is still home to the kind of farm laborers who populated Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men."
City Manager Dave Mora said Salinas was not equipped to weather the sales tax revenue decline that came with an economic downturn. With a large share of local property tax already funneled to the state, lawmakers decided to hold back a pool of vehicle licensing fees promised to local governments to balance their budget, which is costing Salinas $2.7 million.
Then, when health care and retirement costs rose, the city was forced to cut $15 million from a budget of $60 million. Mora said the libraries came last, after the city had already cut police and fire jobs, reduced street cleaning and closed recreation centers. City leaders announced in September that unless the new tax measures passed, the libraries would be closed indefinitely. But library advocates say they now believe voters either did not understand the ballot language or were turned off by what they saw as a scare tactic.
"People just didn't believe the libraries were going to close," Cercone said. "They thought we were crying wolf."
