In Lamont, the local branch of the Kern County Library is open just two days a week, seven hours a day. Same at the Holloway-Gonzales branch on East Brundage Lane, the Baker Street branch in Old Town Kern, the Buttonwillow library on the county’s west side and the Wasco branch in the farm fields northwest of Bakersfield.

It’s just one of many tough decisions county leaders have had to make as they try to feed the branches of this garden with a watering can that’s half-full.

But something very different is happening in Shafter, the innovative community between Bakersfield and Wasco. Here, the people decided that what was happening everywhere else wasn’t going to happen in their town.

“It’s something we’re really proud of,” said Katie Wiebe, president of Friends of the Shafter Library, and one of the community leaders who stepped up to save the valued asset.

Shafter Library & Learning Center, which is now owned and operated by the city of Shafter — with help from Bakersfield College and continuing community support — is open five days a week, 11 hours a day. That’s more hours than the county’s crown jewel, the Beale Memorial Library in Bakersfield, which is open 20 fewer hours per week than Shafter’s.

But the community’s fight wasn’t won overnight.

A petition circulated by Wiebe and fellow library advocate Melissa Bergen in the early days of their effort received more than 1,500 signatures.

It seemed the larger community was on-board.

“I don’t know if this has happened anywhere else before,” Wiebe said of the difficult but successful road Shafter took to save its library and the unique partnerships that were formed along the way.

After trying and failing to make it work with the county, Shafter decided to cut bait and create a city-run library with a different and unique partnership.

In 2021, the Shafter City Council voted to operate the library independently — but with Bakersfield College supplying a portion of the staff and expertise.

To its credit, advocates say, the county of Kern ultimately decided to not stand in the way.

Bakersfield College had already had a productive working relationship with the city of Shafter since 2014, said Romeo Agbalog, a trustee on the Kern Community College District’s governing board.

“Kern County has a very low baccalaureate degree attainment rate that pales in comparison to the statewide average,” Agbalog said.

Studies show that a large percentage of jobs here are vulnerable to automation, he said.

“Workforce development is part of the district’s mission,” Agbalog added. Helping to open pathways to educational opportunities for rural students remains consistent with that mission.

“When I learned the library in Shafter was shuttered, I saw that as a threat,” he said.

Thanks to Agbalog’s influence, BC was able to come to the aid of the library by providing one full-time and two part-time staffers.

In the library’s Learning Center, which is connected, physically, to the library, BC offers tutoring help, courses for English language learners and more.

“The Shafter model,” Agbalog said, “is an example of what libraries of the future could look like.”

BC program manager Ariel Dyer, who works part-time at the library in Shafter, became part of the solution last year.

“I was brought onto the project in October of 2021 as a Bakersfield College program manager, but I suspect I was initially hired at least in part because this project was already in the works,” Dyer said.

“In a lot of ways, we were starting from scratch. The county had gifted us the collection but had come in and taken anything they thought would circulate and anything already in circulation.”

The collection hadn’t been “properly weeded in likely decades,” she said. “Books were dirty, and there were policies to create. So I got to work.”

Dyer soon fell in love with Shafter, its residents and library advocates.

“We cleaned thousands of books, weeded about 1,500, and added over that amount of new books to the collection in the span of less than four months,” she said. “We were determined to open in January.

“I helped write our collection development policy and together with the city staff we worked to come up with our library structure, mission statement, logo, library cards, everything.

“It was wild,” Dyer said. “It was the experience of a lifetime.”

Since its grand opening in January, the Shafter Library & Learning Center has held 1,649 classes and events and hosted 12,454 attendees, said David Franz, the city of Shafter’s education partnership director. 

According to data collected by Franz, 11,650 books were checked out between Jan. 18 and Oct. 28 — that in a city of about 20,000 residents.

In the meantime, local business GAF, a roofing shingles manufacturer, helped finance the addition of a reading lounge for kids, a third classroom often used for cooking and art classes, and a outdoor area for additional activities.

And the Friends of the Shafter Library has raised close to $90,000 in donations to support this little apple of Shafter’s eye.

“I’ve never felt more in my life that I was in the right place at the right time for this happening,” Dyer said. “I’m glad the community of Shafter spoke up for its library until they were heard, and I’m even more glad they were listened to.”