Dear Mayor Combs and City Council members,
Although I currently serve on the MP Library Commission and as a board member of the Menlo Park Library Foundation, my comments are made as an individual who is a 30+ year resident of Menlo Park and are not as a representative of either the Library Commission or the Library Foundation. Because there is such a short timeline between when the budget was published (May 28) and your consideration on June 10, the Library Commission and Library Foundation have not yet had an opportunity to meet to discuss the city budget.
So, as a private citizen, I request that a placeholder amount of at least $75,000 be added to the Library & Community Services budget for 2025-26 so that a focused needs assessment can be conducted of the Menlo Park libraries (both the Main Library and the Branch Library at BHCC) that will result in a detailed action plan to address the current and emerging needs of the community.
As background for this request, significant funds (almost $170,000, of which $90,000 was contributed by the Menlo Park Library Foundation) and effort were spent between 2014-2019 in assessing the Menlo Park Main Library and the branch located at a school in Belle Haven (the study was called “Library System Improvement Project” or “LSIP”).
Further analysis of the Main Library was put on hold in 2019 when the City correctly focused on addressing community needs in Belle Haven. From 2020-2024 both the pandemic and the construction of the BHCC prevented resuming consideration of the Main Library.
Now, with BHCC in operation for over a year and the prospect of thousands of additional residents who will live in housing planned on the USGS, SRI and other nearby sites near the Main Library, this is the perfect time to resurrect the work done in prior years to both assess how and whether both libraries are meeting the current needs of the community, and to proactively consider how to plan for future needs.
Adding a placeholder figure of $75,000 will be a first step to resuming the needed assessments that were begun over 10 years ago. This need was well stated in the 2017 Staff Report No 17-185-CC:
Serving the educational needs of the Menlo Park community is a core mission of the Menlo Park Library. Modern libraries are shifting to meet community demands for different kinds of learning – from spaces designed primarily to house collections, to people-centered spaces better suited to provide experiential learning experiences and opportunities for lifelong learning.
Thank you for your consideration.
Carol Orton
Resident, District 5
