County judge voices concerns about library bill

A bill passed by the state Senate Wednesday that removes a defense for library and school employees regarding obscene material could cause significant issues for the Garland County Quorum Court if it is approved by the state House as written, County Judge Darryl Mahoney said Thursday.

The bill seeks to remove a portion of a defense statute that shields library, school and museum employees from prosecution for items “claimed to be obscene.” In addition to the removal of library and school employees from the statute, the bill also increases the protection for museum employees to include items “determined to be obscene.”

Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Jonesboro, who introduced the bill, said in Wednesday’s Senate session the bill creates “a new appeal process” for people to have items removed from school or public libraries.

“In schools, they have a suggested appeals process,” he said. “They have a mandated policy, but it doesn’t say what that policy is. So this just sets out in our schools an appeal process. … In public libraries now, most of them have an appeal process. You go to the librarian, it goes to the library board, and now it’s going to go on to your city council or your quorum court.”

According to the bill, the “governing body” of the city or county has 30 days to “make a decision” on challenged items that get appealed to it. Mahoney said it would definitely take special meetings of the legislative body to consider challenged items.

“I don’t know how much time it would take for them to actually review (items) since they are not full-time employees or anything, I don’t know how much time it would take for them to review before we could have a meeting because some of them work two or three jobs,” he said.

Garland County Library Director Adam Webb said he feels the bill is trying to take away responsibilities library boards were given when they were formed.

“There’s a big reason why administrative boards were created in Arkansas in the first place, and it’s to help alleviate the workload of local government,” he said.

“So, the county doesn’t want to run its library because it’s too big and unwieldy and has too many employees and is too complicated. They created an administrative board to take care of it for them. Well, now all of a sudden (the Legislature is) saying, ‘Well, the administrative board doesn’t really have administrative powers. We’re going to take those back.’”

Mahoney did note that the quorum court would not be required to actually read the challenged book.

“They didn’t have to read the book; they just had to review it,” he said of the way the bill is worded.

“And it will be an education for me to have to go through that and use the Miller rule and the things set aside to determine whether it’s obscene or not, because I firmly believe that what is obscene to one person may not be obscene to another.”

Mahoney also expressed concern there may be some people whose “goal is just to go through libraries and find items in there that they don’t agree with.”

Webb noted that despite its name, the quorum court does not, at least to his knowledge, have judicial powers.

“I don’t think the quorum court has the authority to make judicial determinations on whether something is protected speech or not,” he said.

“Even if they do, I don’t think this bill tells them explicitly that they have to read the book as a whole, and that they have to evaluate it with a constitutional eye. It just says, whatever they say goes, and they can get rid of as many books as they want. So all of a sudden, you’re making censorship courts in every city and county in the state of Arkansas.”

One of the concerns Mahoney had with the bill was the cost of having librarians review any challenged texts.

The most recent change to the bill removed the requirement of five or seven library personnel to comprise the committee that read and made a decision on the challenged items.

“That was going to have a huge fiscal impact on the library because librarians … they’re some of the highest paid people there,” he said. “So they were going to basically tie up five of their highest-paid people to look at — let’s just say somebody comes in and finds fault with 20 books. Someone’s gonna have to read those 20 books and determine whether they meet the criteria to be obscene or not.”

The cost of special meetings of the quorum court is “minimal,” but Mahoney said that theoretically, the legislative body would likely try to hold meetings regarding challenged items when they hold committee meetings to be fiscally responsible.

“They have committee meetings, and we would basically probably have a special quorum court meeting and try to tie it into a committee meeting — have a committee meeting first the same night, so that we didn’t have to have just that meeting,” he said. “There’ll be some times probably we can’t tie that in. I don’t think it’s going to be a large fiscal impact to the county because the quorum board members would have to be here for the meeting regardless.”