It all started, like many skirmishes in Fresno, with a Facebook post.
And now, after three years of cultural debate, county leaders have begun to study whether to privatize the 116-year-old Fresno County Public Library system.
The assessment, on its face, is about cost savings, county leaders told Fresnoland.
Supervisor Garry Bredefeld asked County Administrative Officer Paul Nerland to conduct the study at the tail end of a dire budget presentation on June 2, where county leaders discussed cost-cutting measures to address a nearly $300 million budget shortfall for the coming fiscal year.
His request was supported by Supervisor Nathan Magsig from the dais, although no formal vote was taken.
“We need to look at ways to save money,” Bredefeld said, at the June 2 meeting.
“There are no sacred cows,” fellow Supervisor Buddy Mendes said in a text to Fresnoland when asked for his thoughts on the proposal.
But for the library system’s staunchest supporters, the question of privatization raises a host of concerns beyond the county’s finances — about the future of the libraries that some see as one of the only bastions of communal gathering space that doesn’t come with an entry fee.
Among those concerns is what privatization could mean for the 300-plus employees that work for the library system. It also raises questions about what kinds of programming the library would support if it were no longer run by a public agency.
“Handing over library operations, budgeting and management to a private company is the worst thing we could do,” said Supervisor Luis Chavez in a text to Fresnoland, “it doesn’t yield savings, pays low wages and benefits if any and reduces the library experience to a simple book-borrowing enterprise where certain books and materials can be censored.”
Library advocates share the apprehension.
“It is my understanding that when the libraries are privatized, the public transparency goes away,” said Shannon Wise, president of Fresno County Friends of the Library, “because it’s a private company running it.”
The American Library Association — which vehemently opposes privatization efforts nationwide — has also outlined several different issues, from a loss of community control to a lack of transparency over public dollars going to a profit-driven company.
On top of concerns over programming and staffing, there’s the question of what privatization would mean for the future of Measure B, Fresno County’s one-eighth-cent sales tax that will sunset in 2029 unless a renewal effort wins over voters in time.
Libraries often at the center of polarized politics
Libraries have increasingly come under scrutiny across the globe in response to culture war clashes in the public sphere.
And privatization efforts are often hatched in polarizing environments, said Josephine Hazelton-Boyle, an assistant professor of public administration at Fresno State, who has researched libraries and politics.
“It’s often disguised as an economic conversation when we know that there’s other political motivations at play,” she told Fresnoland.
Bredefeld, however, resisted the interpretation that this privatization study is linked to some of his own successful efforts this year to restrict the Fresno County Public Library’s displays of support for the LGBTQ+ community, calling them separate efforts.
But he added that he hopes privatization would be a move toward making the library an “apolitical environment.”
“The agenda would be just the education of children and providing books and resources for them to learn,” he said, “without having some political ideology thrown at them every time they come in.”
Fresno County is hardly the first place, even in California, to consider privatizing its libraries.
Huntington Beach has been one such cultural hotspot where clashes over content in the city’s public libraries almost led to privatization, until public outcry resulted in an eleventh-hour shift of officials’ opinion in 2024.
Riverside and Shasta Counties have successfully transitioned their library operations to a private company, Library Systems and Services, Inc. Many cities up and down the Golden State have also turned to that same company to manage their facilities and operations.
But some places, like Santa Clarita, have backtracked, reversing previous decisions to privatize after not seeing the cost savings promised.
It’s also not even Fresno’s first time looking at privatization.
In late 2023, around the time former Supervisor Steve Brandau’s ultimately unsuccessful attempt to establish a children’s book “review committee” was gaining steam, the county received a privatization proposal from Library Systems and Services, Inc. The company, which is backed by private equity, is the primary vendor handling privatization moves across the country.
The contractor projected about $85 million across 10 years in cost savings, or roughly $8.5 million per year, according to the proposal document the county shared with Fresnoland. The LSSI team met with Fresno County leaders a few times in 2023 and 2024, spokesperson Sonja Dosti confirmed, but nothing official came out of it.
Beyond the cultural debates, Fresno County’s libraries have come under scrutiny in the past few years, including when a 2023 grand jury report found that the library doesn’t have as many users as comparable systems, and that oversight of the library’s finances was lacking.
Though the library has weathered storms in recent years, it has also achieved milestones, such as surpassing one million digital checkouts for the first time in 2023.
Wise said she believes some of those achievements and unique offerings have gone overlooked.
“The library works very hard to provide things that everybody in the community can use,” she said. “They even have telescopes you can check out to go stargazing. You can get state park passes for free. … Some branches have seed libraries where you can plant vegetables. There’s a lot of services the library offers that I think a lot of people don’t know about.”
Librarians concerned about future jobs
County library staffers do have some job protections in the face of privatization, thanks to a 2011 law passed by the California legislature.
AB 438 lays out requirements for jurisdictions that do choose to privatize, including that contract with a private library operator “shall not cause an existing city or library district employee to incur a loss of his or her employment or employment seniority, a reduction in wages, benefits, or hours, or an involuntary transfer to a new location requiring a change in residence.”
At full staffing, spokesperson Susan Renfro confirmed the Fresno County Public Library System employs 319 people, give or take seven who are technically assigned to the San Joaquin Valley Library system and whose labor costs are covered by that regional group of libraries.
But supporters of the public library system here said they worry what would happen to the quality of those jobs if a private company stepped in.
“Our understanding is that … when they come in, they basically terminate the employment of all the people who are staffed at the library, and they have to reply for their jobs,” said Shannon Wise, president of the Friends of the Fresno County Public Library. “It’s often at a lower pay scale, and the benefits are different because you no longer have a government pension, it’s gonna be a 401(k), and that affects your retirement benefits.
“That’s our biggest concern.”
Chavez, the county supervisor, also echoed this worry about workers’ future wages and benefits with a private company.
When asked about how privatization could affect library staff jobs, Bredefeld said that although he never wants to see anyone lose a job, he also has an obligation to constituents and taxpayers “to utilize our resources as efficiently and as effectively as we can.”
“Whenever there’s been issues of privatization,” he said, “it’s always been a concern of ensuring that people who are working for us — whether it was at the city or county — we preserve their employment as best we can.”
SEIU Local 521, the union that represents Fresno County library employees, declined to comment for this story.
Could privatization efforts jeopardize Measure B funding?
The privatization discussion has also created confusion about the future of the Measure B sales tax.
The tax revenue is a financial lifeline for the library. It propped up more than half the system’s budget in the 2025-2026 fiscal year, or about 55% to 58% of funding, according to Renfro. An additional 37% comes from county property taxes.
Minutes from a January meeting of the Measure B Citizens Review Panel estimate that Measure B revenue at approximately $25.7 million for the 2025-2026 fiscal year, and property tax at $17 million.
“We don’t know what effect privatization has on public funding of the library,” Wise said. “That is something we would have to engage legal counsel with … and also reviewing the language very specifically in Measure B because it has to be used for the library, but I don’t know if privatization is something that’s addressed.”
Bredefeld said he hopes the implications for Measure B are included in the county study.
He sees a different threat to the renewal of the tax.
“I’ve been very concerned, frankly, about the way LGBT agenda has been promoted in the libraries,” he said, “and I’ve gotten the calls from many parents who are very concerned about what’s going on there.
“People have been very, very supportive of libraries, as am I,” he added. “But we have to run libraries in a way that’s free of the political agendas, and just allowing young people to utilize them as they always have, for studying and research and going to the library, where you can do homework and learn about the world without having some political agenda shoved down your throat.”
Library advocates agree that the library should be for all, no matter your politics.
“Libraries are there to serve everyone regardless of their political beliefs and I think that message sometimes gets lost,” said Hazelton-Boyle, the Fresno State professor.
The cost savings from privatizing the county’s system is expected to be shared with supervisors by the end of the calendar year, according to Dosti, the county spokesperson.
