The Pacific Grove Public Library needs cash. Fast.

At a February brainstorming summit, 100-plus bookworms pooled ideas like bake sales, dance-offs and taxes from medical pot sales (assuming officials green-light dispensaries). Participants considered creating a library foundation, and a new steering committee aims to rally for another parcel tax ballot measure.

The loudest buzz, however, came from a January meeting between PGPL leaders and Monterey Bay Aquarium staff. “[David and Lucile] Packard Foundation funding is always a potential for nonprofits that are looking for support,” says Aquarium spokesman Hank Armstrong, a P.G. resident and library donor.

But the same locals who opposed the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History’s transition from public to public-private entity, with help from a Packard grant, are freaked out by the meeting.

“This was the first step in the Aquarium-backed takeover of the museum,” Esther Trosow wrote in a group e-mail. (The Aquarium is affiliated with, but separate from, the Packard Foundation.) “This is ominous if we want the library to remain a P.G. department and not be privatized.”

“There’s absolutely no basis for that thought,” Armstrong counters. “It’s not something the Packard Foundation would be interested in.”

PGPL Senior Librarian Lisa Maddalena says the library may apply for a Packard organizational improvement grant, which could help with short-term planning but not long-term operations. “We’re just tossing it around,” she says. “It certainly would not be an Aquarium takeover.”

Many museums are private, she says, but taxpayer-funded public libraries are an American tradition. On average, PGPL serves more than 2,000 people – many seeking job-training materials and Internet access – during its scaled-back hours four days per week, she adds.

The Fund Our Library campaign (www.pacificgrove.lib.ca.us/support_the_library.html) has raised $37,000 since mid-December, Maddalena reports. But Lisa Bennett, City Council liaison to the library board, says the library needs an ongoing boost on the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars to meet its almost $1 million in annual operating costs, of which the city only covers about half.

A new fundraising foundation, perhaps as an arm of Friends of the Library, could help. But Bennett doubts it would fill the gap: “It takes quite a long time to develop an ongoing base of support that would provide the kind of money we’re talking about.”

She sees one solution for sustainable library funding: “Clearly it’s a new tax measure, I’m sorry to say.”

Last November’s Measure J, a parcel tax to fund the library, fell 0.7 percent shy of the two-thirds supermajority needed to pass. Some summit attendees blamed the narrow loss on voter frustration that revenue from June 2008’s successful Measure U, a 1 percent sales tax hike, doesn’t all go to the library.

But Bennett says it was more of a blessing than Pagrovians realize. “Measure U was not specifically for the library; it was for anything we needed it for,” she says. “But if it hadn’t passed, the library would be closed.”

As for fears the library will be “Packardized,” Bennett – who defends the Packards’ limited role in reviving the museum – scoffs.

“We cannot expect the same kind of quote-unquote ‘takeover,’ if you will, to even be feasible,” she says. “This is our library; we gotta save it ourselves.”