Senate Bill 81: GC Library board expresses concerns over proposed law
Members of the Garland County Library Board of Trustees listened to concerns about a state Senate bill that targets how school and public libraries handle items considered obscene and expressed a few of their own during their regular monthly meeting Monday.
Garland County Library Director Adam Webb gave the five-member board a brief summary of the bill that was approved by the Senate last week and was sent to the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee. He also told them there has been a significant amount of support for libraries in light of the bill.
“I know I’m probably an unreliable narrator on that because I work at the library and so the people who come into the library obviously, for the most part, are going to have a pro-library slant on the bill,” he said.
“As far as I’ve talked so far, I would not say it would be an overestimate to say that I’ve had 100 patrons either call me or email me or come want to talk to me about the bill and say, ‘How can I help? What can I do?’ Of course, in my official capacity as the library director, I have to be very cautious about, ‘Well, this is what the bill is; this is what the bill does.’”
The director has also spoken before the state Senate twice in his capacity as president of the organization Advocates for All Arkansas Libraries, which he noted was done on his own time. He said there were concerns he wanted to raise before the board.
“As a library director, I do think that there are concerns in this bill that should be discussed among the library board, most importantly, I think it would be maybe a go-around of the board’s authority on making determinations on what is acceptable in the library,” he said.
Merek Rowe, the treasurer of the board, said he was concerned the bill made it out of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
“I’m surprised they got it out of committee because of the First Amendment (issues it poses),” he said.
The board’s president, Karen Harbut, noted that as the board members were appointed by the quorum court, the board was acting on the legislative body’s behalf.
“They’re substituting that (process) after we already went through our processes,” she said. “And again, the quorum court appointed me on this board.”
Webb said the board had been requested to provide an “unbiased crib sheet” to the quorum court to give the county’s legislative body an explanation of what the bill does and how it would affect the body.
“I know the quorum court has requested some sort of crib sheet, a factual, unbiased crib sheet on what the bill says and does and how it would affect the quorum court,” he said. “It certainly could fur up their work if somebody submits 1,000 book challenges, and then they would have to go through one at a time and determine whether they’re going to keep 1,000 books in the county library. If somebody did that, that would be as many books as I’ve read in my lifetime.”
The board asked Webb to draft a document that explains what the bill would do in regard to the quorum court for them to discuss and vote on next month.
Rowe mentioned he was happy to see one part of the bill removed.
“Well, the piece that I was mostly concerned about has been eliminated, which is I don’t want an official coming here and arresting you because somebody said (something is obscene) without there being due process in that,” he said.