What Did It Really Cost to Say Goodbye to Santa Barbara’s City Librarian

Did It Really Cost $1.6 Million Plus Chaos and Confusion? Probably

Credit: Paul Wellman (file)

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OVER EASY: A library isn’t quite sanctified space, per se. But for a whole lot of us, it qualifies as sanctuary. A quiet spot away from our gathering storms. A place to get our nerd worms on and emerge from the chrysalis to what we might become. Or maybe just discover the mass magic of reading.

And what is reading, if not magic?

For me, it was more mixed. The library was one of the destinations my father — in my mind, the second coming of Atticus Finch — and I would go together when I was a kid. But on the drive over, my father would let loose a steady stream of white-hot profanity, steeped in the blood of Jesus and all the saints. He’d rake his scalp; he’d grind his jaw.

We all have demons.

On occasion, he’d veer absentmindedly into the path of oncoming traffic. “You’re getting in their lane,” I’d mention. He’d look over reassuringly. “This way, they have to look out for you,” he’d say.

Years later, I would understand this to be a major life lesson.

For the record, I never saw Jessica Cadiente coming and I never really saw her go. But as of February 19, Cadiente is now officially gone as the head of the City of Santa Barbara’s library system. They paid her $500,000 to go away. But only after paying her nearly a year’s salary not to show up for work. This being a personnel matter, no one could talk about it. City Hall has its own whole omerta thing. Only a few rumors managed to squeak out. And their reliability was, at most, dubious.

What we do know is that Cadiente’s tenure — nearly 10 years — was uncommonly stormy. Under her watch, a whole lot of really big things got done. The library plaza project got funded and finished and the library’s interior had a major makeover.

Admittedly, it’s a spaciously sprawling space now, not the place I expected to see comfortably cluttered with books. But I get that books are old-school. Cadiente, a forward-looking futurist, was pedal to the metal about embracing the new digital realities. And she took seriously the need to reach out to low-income communities.

Personally speaking, however, my hair caught fire when I learned the downtown library’s amazing collection of local history news clippings — painstakingly collected over the years by generations of reference librarians — had been scattered to the winds.

This treasure trove is the equivalent of Google for a period of Santa Barbara’s history that precedes the existence of Google. By “the winds,” I mean that these files were divided up and given to UCSB’s Special Research Collections, to the Gledhill Library at the Historical Museum, and to the Santa Barbara Genealogical Society.

For the record, I love all three. They are great institutions, But, for years, I have used these documents to time-travel. To check facts, and to remember what happened and when. I still can, of course. But not nearly as easily as I used to. I think it’s possible to rearrange the furniture without displacing the people already sitting on the couch.

The library was the perfect place to do this. It is open seven days a week. Anyone can use it, pretty much anytime. And I don’t have go to the ninth floor of the university building with climate-controlled rooms where white gloves are required and only pencils — no pens — are allowed.

Or the Gledhill Library — truly great, but not open to the public five days a week, let alone seven. Or the Genealogical Society, which, even if you’ve been there 10 times, you still can get lost.

Around City Hall, people would joke about “Cadiente’s way” or “Jessica’s law.” It was her way, the saying went, or the highway. You got the feeling she liked breaking eggs more than she enjoyed making omelets.

All I know is a whole lot of amazingly talented and dedicated library professionals walked out the door. With one exception, they never came back. They found fantastic jobs somewhere else, like running the state equivalent of the Library of Congress, or running adult education for the California State Library, or running the IT program for City College. According to City Hall, there was a 24 percent turnover of library staff between the years 2017 and 2024. I have been told by Cadiente’s attorney these numbers are misleading. Maybe so.

Anecdotally, I have been that told 20 to 24 people — professional librarians, people with PhDs, highly trained individuals — were moved to look for greener pastures. According to these people, Cadiente is whip-smart, incredibly hardworking, and driven. And she hired a lot of great people, who subsequently learned to walk on eggshells or out the door. Or cried a lot. “About 50 percent of the time, I’d say Jessica was really right,” one happily employed-somewhere-else librarian told me. “Really right. But just because you’re right doesn’t mean you can’t also be a bully.”

According to social media comments posted in defense of Cadiente on Instagram, these are all the complaints of big-mouth, do-nothing whiners and complainers. The same posts likened the swath Cadiente cut through the library to Elon Musk’s — and that of his DOGE Bro Brigade — through the federal workforce. I’d say that with supporters like this, Cadiente needs no detractors.

Okay, how crazy is this? On Cadiente’s watch, the City of Santa Barbara seceded from the massively convenient Black Gold interlibrary loan system that allows people in Carpinteria to borrow books from libraries in Paso Robles. Black Gold is the library equivalent of the United Nations and NATO. Can you imagine the United States quitting the United Nations or NATO?

Oh, you mean we already have?

What I do know is that on February 19, Cadiente and City Administrator Kelly McAdoo signed a legal document saying that Cadiente would receive four checks totaling $500,000. In exchange, she would no longer work for City Hall and would not sue City Hall. In other words, $500,000 is now what the attorneys like to call “Go Away” money. Of that, $171,000 went to legal fees.

But that tells only a part of the story.

For the 11 months prior, Cadiente had been placed on what’s called paid administrative leave. That means you collect all your pay and benefits and continue to accrue sick time and vacation time, but you don’t show up for work. Given that the top of Cadiente’s pay grade was $19,500 a month, that’s a lot.

But there’s more. Before placing Cadiente on paid administrative leave, City Hall hired a private law firm from San Francisco to conduct an investigation into the library that would last eight months and cost City Hall $655,788. That’s not chicken feed.

And while Cadiente was on administrative leave, City Hall had to reassign Brandon Beaudette, a 25-year jack-of-all-trades administrator, to run the library. Beaudette is an administrative A-Leaguer, an All-Star. He’s now run four separate departments, he lobbies the state legislature in Sacramento on city matters, he helped get the much-needed Business Improvement District passed, and he otherwise plays an invisible but crucial role in city budgetary matters. So you have to factor in the cost of his salary, too.

All told, that comes out to about $1.6 million on the back of my napkin. But that doesn’t count all the chaos and confusion and costs generated by all the turnover. All the lost goodwill. And all the unnecessary grief. Making all this especially shameful is that City Hall knew about Cadiente’s penchant for stepping on toes before hiring her. I spoke to a councilmember who told me he’d been approached by two people who knew Cadiente from when she ran Lompoc’s library. “You’re in for it now,” they told him.

To be fair, former City Administrator Paul Casey met with library workers long before Cadiente was hired. He asked them what they most wanted in a new boss. They were unanimous. They wanted someone really tough and who would fight for them.

What was it I was told again? “Fifty percent of the time, she gets it really right.”

But sometimes 50 percent just won’t do.

What did my father say again about veering into the lane of oncoming traffic? “This way, they have to look out for you”?

Maybe we shoulda looked out better.