Allegheny County public library patrons who’ve stopped going because of fines on their cards might want to get a new read on the situation. About half of the county’s libraries, including the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, have not only stopped levying late fees, they’re also forgiving old charges.
The Carnegie Library announced last week it was going fine-free at all 19 branches, basically making permanent its suspension of late fees during the pandemic. And in late January, the library purged its system of pre-existing fines, some of which were preventing card holders from accessing library services, said spokesperson Suzanne Thinnes.
“For anybody that had fines on their library card, they’re going to start with a clean slate,” Thinnes said. The library informed cardholders of the changes in an email blast last week.
About two dozen of the county’s 46 libraries in have similar policies, said Amy Anderson, CEO of the Allegheny County Library Association. They include the public libraries in Monroeville, Mount Lebanon, and Penn Hills. And libraries in Dormont and Robinson Township are going that route later this year, she said.
The move toward fine-free started in 2019, with a pilot project that included three Carnegie Library branches and 11 other libraries. Anderson said the experiment resulted in increased usage in most of the libraries, as measured in new library cards issued and counts of active users. Meanwhile, though fees went away, the vast majority of books and other items checked out were still returned on time, she said.
“We saw a number of people returning back into the spaces and actually it didn’t really change people’s behavior in terms of returning materials by their due date,” said the Carnegie Library's Thinnes.
During the pandemic, the Carnegie Library's fine-free policy went system-wide.
Contrary to popular belief, libraries do not rely on late fees for much of their revenue. Anderson said the typical figure countywide is about 3 percent.
At the Carnegie, said Thinnes, the number is about 1 percent – and had been declining with the growing popularity of e-books, which are not subject to late fees.
Thinnes said the Carnegie Library has about 206,000 cardholders, of whom 21 percent had outstanding fees that have now been canceled. Thinnes declined to provide a dollar figure for the total fees forgiven, but said most of those cardholders owed about $10 each.
The Carnegie Library’s 2022 operating budget is about $39,000,000, most of it from the Allegheny Regional Asset District and other tax-funded sources.
Library officials emphasized that lost or damaged materials remain subject to replacement fees.
