Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. signed the FY12 California state budget on June 30, the last day of the fiscal year, and it contains a double dose of bad news for public library funding. The budget also contains massive cuts to the state's higher education system. First, as expected, the budget cuts state funding for public libraries in half, to $15.2 million. This includes $3 million for the Public Library Fund (PLF), $3.7 million for the California Library Literacy and English Acquisition Service, and $8.5 million for the California Library Services Act (CLSA). Second, a "trigger" amendment attached to the budget would eliminate all state funding for public libraries at midyear if the state's revenue projections are not being met. Funding for the California Civil Liberties Public Education Program and the California Newspaper Project administered by the state library would also be eliminated, which would bring the total midyear cut to $15.9 million. "We won't actually know that until January. We are trying to figure out what this means," said Carol Simmons, the executive director of the California Library Association. "I'm hopeful that the revenues will be there and we will have this funding available in January," she said, adding that even if the 50 percent reduction stands it still was not "a happy cut" and will likely result in reduced services throughout the state. Within the CLSA are the state's eight Cooperative Library Systems (map here) as well as Transaction-Based Reimbursement (TBR), which together provide the infrastructure and the funding mechanism that permit the state's public libraries to provide services, such as interlibrary loans (ILL) or reference, across jurisdictions to any state resident bearing a library card. As Santa Clara did in May, public library districts will have to begin charging non-residents fees for such services to compensate for the state withdrawing support for resource sharing, and the potential breakdown of this resource-sharing ecosystem is a major concern of Stacey Aldrich, the state librarian, and other librarians around the state as they already face major cutbacks at the local level as well. "We live in interesting times, that's for sure," Aldrich said June 26 at the ALA annual conference in New Orleans. "It's not very much money but it has held equal access together in the state, so anywhere you live in the state you can get a library card with the exception of seven libraries that don't participate," she said. "But what we are seeing is fracturing because they don't know how much money they are going to get, so there are concerns," Aldrich said. "My larger concern is equal access around the state. If we don't have any funding and local libraries are having issues in terms of having enough money to support their users, I'm concerned about the fracturing of equal access," she said. Meanwhile, the University of California (UC) and California State University (CSU) would each have to absorb a cut of $650 million under the new budget. Although the impact on the individual library systems was not yet completely clear, the overall reduction was roundly condemned by the campus-wide administration at both systems. Community college funding would also be reduced by $400 million. Tom Leonard, the university librarian at UC Berkeley, said his library has been coping with service cuts and reduced staff for the past few years, and that this latest budget will cut the operating budget for FY12 by about $1 million. He was most concerned about the impact on collection development. "In the long term that’s the most serious concern," he said. "We know in many fields if you miss materials you will not have the opportunity to get it again." UC's overall reduction would leave it with $2.25 billion in state funding, down from $2.91 billion in FY11. "Without a stable, predictable funding base, our long-term quality is seriously threatened," University of California President Mark Yudof and Board of Regents Chairman Russell Gould said in a joint statement. "This budget plan would be bad for all Californians. That's why we will fight it," they said. CSU general fund support would be reduced to $2.1 billion, a 23 percent cut. An additional midyear cut of $100 million would be triggered if revenue projections are not met. This is the same level of funding the system received in the 1998-99 fiscal year. CSU libraries have already reduced book and journal purchases in anticipation of at least a $500 million cut, and further reduction in library hours, services, or staff are possible as the 23 campuses seeks to cut expenditures by $281 million. But the individual campuses will decide how to implement those savings, said Michael Uhlenkamp, CSU's director of media relations and new media. "What was once unprecedented has unfortunately become normal, as for the second time in three years the CSU will be cut by well over $500 million," said CSU Chancellor Charles B. Reed, in a statement. "The magnitude of this cut, compounded with the uncertainty of the final amount of the reduction, will have negative impacts on the CSU long after this upcoming fiscal year has come and gone."