Tauranga City Councillors meddling with city library charges against staff advice is coming back to bite them.

They learned this week that interfering with DVD hire charges is the main factor in an expected $200,000 loss in revenue so far this year.

'It's mainly because we are so far down with DVDs,” city libraries manager Jill Best told the projects and monitoring committee this week.

'I believe we would make more money if we put the charges down to where they were.”

Councillors attacked the libraries operation last year.

After taking a hiding in a public backlash against proposals to charge for all non-fiction, they turned round and increased charges on DVDs while halving the time they were available, and drastically reduced the number of books people can take out of the library from 99 to 20.

Library staff advice at the time was to reduce the book numbers to 40, but councillors felt that was too many and supported David Stewart's motion that 20 books be trialled for six months.

It failed spectacularly and ended up costing more in staff time to manage. Councillors relented in October and book numbers were raised to 40.

They also reconsidered the DVD hire time which was dropped from two weeks to one week when the price was increased from $3 to $4.

DVDs can once more be hired for two weeks, but the price remains at $4.

It makes DVD hire from the library more expensive than commercial operators bulk special offers.

'There is consumer resistance on that,” Jill told the meeting.

'DVDs have just priced themselves off the market. We are just going down and down on this.”

The $200,000 shortfall in revenue is not comparing apples with apples, because the councillors also moved the goalposts, requiring the city's libraries to increase their financial performance – at the same time they took the steps that are still reflected in reduced business performance.

Year to date library book issues are still 1.9 per cent below target. Top title fiction is three per cent down and DVD and CD hire is 21.6 per cent down.

Income from user fees remains at 97 per cent of target. Revenue from top title books is 73 per cent of target and DVDs are at 52 per cent of target.

Speaking outside the meeting Jill says there is a similar issue with magazines which are one-week hire.

'I thought the difference with the magazines we would get a quicker turnover and more people would get to read them, if we cut that down to a week,” says Jill. 'But the stats are now showing us that that isn't really working either, because clearly most people don't come to the library every week. They prefer to have it for two weeks. We are looking at that shortly.”