Portage County library says compliance with state budget bill is costly and impractical

Acknowledging that his request is “last-resort” advocacy, Portage County District Library director Jonathan Harris has sent a plea and a promise directly to Governor Mike DeWine’s desk.

At issue is a provision in the proposed Ohio budget bill that restricts where public libraries may shelve material related to sexuality or gender identity. Any sexuality, and all gender identities, Harris told The Portager. Legislators are in the final steps of considering the bill, which upon DeWine’s signature will become law.

Harris called the bill “inherently flawed.” Given its vague language — no distinction is made between heterosexual, homosexual or other identities — PCDL staff would have to go through its entire collection, book by book. Any deemed objectionable would have to be reshelved in a restricted area inaccessible to anyone under the age of 18, Harris said.

No book is safe, Harris said, vowing not to comply with the bill’s provisions.

Anne Frank’s “Diary of a Young Girl” directly mentions her gender identity in the title. “Goodnight, Gorilla” and “Where do Diggers Sleep at Night?”, both offerings of Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, could also be targeted: one because an illustration shows a male and female adult sharing a bed and the other because it assigns gender identity to trucks and construction equipment.

“It would be impossible for us to implement,” he said. “Some of our buildings are only one room. There’d be no way for us to separate things out like that.”

Faced with similar strictures, an Idaho library closed its doors to anyone under the age of 18, Harris told The Portager.

“It’s obviously not a preferred or sensible answer for us. Their answer was compliance that actually hurt access to people. Our answer is noncompliance to keep things open,” he said.

There’s also a cost to compliance. The Columbus Metropolitan Library has estimated it would cost more than $3 million to go through its entire collection and figure out how to segregate the books, Harris said.

PCDL’s price tag would be less, but “to us that would be an incredible waste of taxpayer money,” Harris said.

Noting that when a public library is forced to restrict access based on a partisan issue, everybody loses, Harris urged DeWine to use his line-item veto power to strike the provision.

“This is not a slippery slope. Once we open that door, that’s it, that’s the whole ballgame,” Harris wrote.

People must hold fast to the principles of intellectual freedom and equal access to information for all people, he stated.

“In that spirit, and in full awareness of the possible consequences, if the current language is included on any final version of the budget,” we will not comply. I simply cannot be a party to the encroachment of partisan politics into our ability to provide public service to all our patrons,” Harris wrote.

What those consequences might be are unknown: the budget bill does not currently include any enforcement mechanisms, Harris told The Portager.

“This is something where legislators are trying to create a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist, [creating] the narrative that libraries are unsafe for children,” he said.

Harris said he remains hopeful that reasonable minds will ultimately prevail. Parents have the right and responsibility to decide what’s right for themselves and their families, and have the right to be active in that process.

“But that doesn’t mean they get to make those decisions for other patrons and other families,” Harris said.

The Portage County District Library system includes Aurora Memorial Library, Brimfield Library, Garrettsville Library, Pierce Streetsboro Library, Randolph Library and Windham Library. It also oversees outreach services.

Stacey Richardson, director of Kent Free Library, said she and her staff are adopting a wait and see attitude. KFL already limits what patrons with juvenile cards may check out, and parents of minors must provide the library with permission for their children to use the computer lab.

“It’s just so vague at this point. We don’t understand entirely what they’re asking us to do, and I don’t think they know what they’re asking us to do, or how far-reaching their decision could be. I don’t exactly know what’s going to happen,” she said.

Should the budget bill in its current form become law, KFL would have to somehow find staff and time to inspect its entire 130,000+ item print collection, and to find room it doesn’t have for who knows how many books that would have to be segregated, she said. Whether titles KFL offers digitally through multi-system consortiums remains unknown. Ditto titles offered by third-party vendors.

Richardson stopped just short of saying KFL will not comply if DeWine signs the budget with its library provision in place.

“We feel that parents know what is best for their children,” she said. “Parents are always able to select what is appropriate for their own children and their own families. Parents have always been responsible for what their children are borrowing at the library, and that will not change.”

State legislators have simultaneously urged Ohio’s librarians to expand literacy efforts while tightening controls over what materials are acceptable, Ravenna’s Reed Memorial Library Director Amy Young said.

RML already labels and separates books meant for children, young adults and adults, and is in the process of moving adult material to a separate floor to further ensure that children do not have easy access to them, she said.

Regarding the proposed budget bill, library staff do not have time to read every single book and determine if a single sentence might be controversial, she said. Should the bill’s current language become law, Young said her response will largely mirror Harris’: The books will remain on the shelves.

“Right now we don’t plan on really doing anything more than we already do, which is have a collection development policy that we adhere to and that we can defend,” she said. “We don’t try to stand in the place of a parent. We expect that parents pay attention to what their children are checking out, and we don’t feel like it’s our job to pay attention and police that.”

Parents, not librarians and not government officials, should discuss controversial subject matter with their children, Young said.

“We make all items available and a parent can decide what they will allow their child to read. They can make decisions about their own children but not about anyone else’s,” Young said.