My favorite Mission District destination

The other day I answered some questionnaire, one of whose questions was "What's your favorite feature of your neighborhood?" I remember thinking they wanted some store perhaps -- but I knew right away that my answer was our nearby public library.

So I'm overjoyed that San Francisco's Board of Supervisors (what would be called a city council most places) has passed a resolution to end late fees and reduce outstanding fines. This has been in the works for awhile. Mission Local did its usual good job of explaining:

This means that the more than 17,000 local patrons whose accounts were previously blocked due to accumulated overdue fines (which was automatic once a fine of $10 was accrued) will once again be free to check out library materials. And the 157,000 library patrons — some 35 percent of the library’s users — who owe late fees will now be in the clear. Among those owing money, the average tab was $23.

Michelle Jeffers, a spokeswoman for the San Francisco Public Library, said she has been looking forward to this decision for a while. “We really feel that late fees had been leading to inequity for certain segments of the community,” she said, adding that the fees are incongruous with the overall mission of a public library. “We want to be welcoming and equitable, and we want more people to be able to use the library.”

Jeffers isn’t concerned that the elimination of late fees will lead to later returns or longer wait times for books.

“We’ve been a library for 140 years, and fines haven’t really changed people’s behavior,” she said. “There are a lot of people who return their books on time, and a lot of people who don’t.”

Librarians are realists who want their patrons to use their resources. How healthy!