Members of the Arkansas State Library Board (left to right) Jason Rapert, Lupe Peña de Martínez and Donnette Smith participate in a meeting on Friday, November 8, 2024. Rapert has continually advocated for withholding state funding from libraries that contain books he considers inappropriate for children. (Mary Hennigan/Arkansas Advocate)
As public libraries throughout Arkansas have come under scrutiny in recent years, some have faced uncertainty about the future of their funding sources, which determine what resources they offer their communities.
The only library system that has seen a funding cut so far is the one in Craighead County, where citizens narrowly voted in 2022 to halve the property tax dedicated to library funding.
Craighead County residents who supported the defunding had previously decried the availability of books they considered “inappropriate for minors.” Their protests started in 2021, in response to an LGBTQ+ book display and a transgender author’s visit to the library.
Other counties saw the same argument over content in the following years, fueled in part by a state law that would change how librarians handle content challenges and criminalize their decisions about materials. Parts of Act 372 of 2023 were temporarily blocked in federal court in 2023 and permanently blocked Monday. Outcry over “inappropriate” books quieted down in 2024.
At the same time, claims that libraries are overfunded have come to the forefront, sometimes in communities where there has been no organized backlash against the books on the shelves. Residents of three counties tried to gather support for ballot measures this year to reduce their libraries’ property tax millage.
The measure to cut Lawrence County’s millage in half failed by a large margin, and officials in Saline and Garland counties declared the measures ineligible for the ballot. Meanwhile, an effort to restore some of Craighead County’s library funding failed.
Northeast Arkansas county voters reject proposal to restore library funding
Librarians and library advocates have said they are heartened by public opposition to defunding efforts. They have also expressed frustration about the challenge of convincing some local governments and community members to trust them to be financially responsible.
To fend off future defunding efforts, librarians need to educate Arkansans on “how library funding works” and “how libraries operate in general,” said Adam Webb, the incoming president of the Arkansas Library Association and executive director of the Garland County Library.
Libraries in two other counties have not faced active defunding efforts, but county government officials have publicly put the libraries’ finances under a microscope. A judge ordered the Crawford County Library in September to stop separating LGBTQ+ books from the rest of the collection, and county officials want the library to pay the legal fees of the patrons who sought the order. Governance of Marion County’s library is up in the air after the director’s arrest in early December for alleged financial crimes.
Additionally, some Republican state officials have said libraries’ funding should be granted only under certain conditions.
Some critics of libraries have claimed they are left-wing entities. Libraries are nonpartisan, though they cannot be considered neutral “when you have every type of speech that the world can come up with in one building,” Webb said.
“All we’re doing is standing up for First Amendment rights and protecting free speech, so it’s frustrating that when people aren’t getting their way, the natural recourse is to just defund [libraries],” he said.
Local conflicts over library funding
In August 2023, Saline County Judge Matt Brumley fired county library director Patty Hector after the quorum court granted him the power to do so. Hector had refused to relocate books with “sexual content or imagery” out of children’s reach at the quorum court’s urging after Act 372 became law.
Hector’s decision met hostility from some members of the public. Some of those individuals sent the library a series of Arkansas Freedom of Information Act requests, later claiming at meetings that both the financial information they received and the library’s slow FOIA response time were signs of misconduct.
Craighead County saw a similar pattern of FOIA requests and accusations of financial wrongdoing by citizens who wanted LGBTQ+ books moved away from children and later supported defunding the library. Saline County residents who supported the library warned the quorum court that the campaign against Hector and LGBTQ+ books likely preceded a defunding campaign as well.
In October of this year, the Saline Courier reported that Brumley rejected a citizen-led effort to put a measure on the November ballot to cut the library’s funding. Amendment 38 of the Arkansas Constitution requires at least 100 signatures from “taxpaying electors” for a proposal to change the tax levy that funds a local library.
Webb said Amendment 38 is a “criminally low standard” for putting library funding up to a public vote. Codie Crumpton, secretary of the Saline County Republican Women, submitted 171 signatures to Brumley in favor of reducing the county library millage from 1.7 to 0.9 mills.
Concerns about both financial mismanagement, based on the FOIA responses, and children’s access to certain books made circulating the petition “a good option,” Crumpton said. She and her cohorts haven’t seen “any sort of meaningful change” since Hector’s firing, she said, and she expressed disappointment that Leigh Espey, Hector’s successor as Saline County Library director, has “stood her ground” when approached about controversial library content.
Crumpton said she plans to circulate another petition after she “learned a lesson” from Brumley’s rejection of the first one over technicalities.
The Saline County Library Alliance, a nonpartisan organization that formed to support the library in 2023, was prepared for the defunding petition and will be prepared for another one, organizer Bailey Morgan said.
“They were so loud with the content argument that we were able to get ahead of the funding argument,” Morgan said. “Moving forward will be a continuation of that. We will let folks know that the library is not stealing your money, that very little of your property tax actually goes to the library and [defunding] would be a savings of a few dollars at best.”
Some Saline County residents said last year that Hector should be investigated over the library’s finances. There was no such investigation in Saline County, but there was one in Marion County that culminated in the now-former library director’s arrest on Dec. 2.
The county sheriff’s office charged Dana Scott with two counts of tampering with public records and one count of failure to pay or file tax returns, both of which are Class D felonies. Scott pleaded not guilty on Dec. 10. Her attorney, Samuel Pasthing, declined to comment at this stage in the case.
Scott’s arrest came after years of scrutiny and criticism of the library from the Marion County quorum court, which repeatedly declined to include in the county budget the library board’s recommended merit pay raise for Scott.
Quorum court member Claudia Brigham sent the library a series of FOIA requests in August and September asking for detailed financial documents, such as cash logs, the library’s tax ID number and the dollar amount of merchandise the library sold in recent years. The Advocate obtained the requests via its own FOIA query.
Brigham attended several library board meetings earlier this year, and she repeatedly asked the board for financial information and criticized what she saw as a lack of transparency, according to meeting minutes. She did not respond to requests for comment and will not be on the quorum court after Dec. 31.
Library oversight
The Marion County sheriff’s investigation into Scott began after Alesia Owen filed a complaint with the local prosecuting attorney raising questions about library finances. Owen was a library board member from February 2022 to August 2024, and board meeting minutes from those two and a half years indicate Owen did not publicly express financial concerns to the board. She declined to comment when reached by phone.
Public libraries are required by state law to have five-member administrative boards. Three days after Scott’s arrest, County Judge Jason Stumph dismissed all four library board members, with one seat vacant after Owen’s resignation. Stumph told the board its dismissal was accountability for not supervising Scott more closely.
Quorum courts are responsible for confirming new county library board members after the county judge makes recommendations from a pool of applicants. Brumley reminded the Saline County Library board of this power in May 2023, in light of Hector’s refusal to relocate LGBTQ+ books, and criticized what he saw as insufficient oversight of Hector and library finances.
Brumley urged the library board to hire an accounting firm to audit the library, but the board’s efforts to do so have yielded no results over a year later. Hector said private auditors have been unwilling to engage because the state’s nonpartisan government oversight arm, Arkansas Legislative Audit, already examines libraries as part of required annual audits of all 75 counties.
The state’s audit of Saline County in 2023 found no issues with the library. The same was true of Marion County’s 2022 and 2023 audits.
Hector said it’s unlikely that a state auditor’s “very thorough and professional” examination of library finances would have missed the alleged crimes in the charges facing Scott.
Library finances face “a higher level of scrutiny… than other political subdivisions” due to state audits, library board supervision and local governments’ approval of the budgets, Webb said, creating “more potential for catching errors.”
However, audits are rarely mentioned by libraries’ detractors because “it undercuts the narrative that libraries are fiscally irresponsible,” Webb said.
State funding
The Arkansas State Library Board disburses taxpayer funds to public libraries on a quarterly basis. Jason Rapert, a former Republican state senator appointed to the board in 2023, argued at all four board meetings this year that libraries with “sexually explicit” content within children’s reach should not receive state funds.
Rapert’s defunding attempts have failed due to opposition from the other six board members, including Shari Bales of Hot Springs, who was appointed alongside Rapert.
When Garland County officials were tasked with approving or rejecting the petition to reduce the county library’s funding, Bales was one of many county residents to urge officials at a public hearing to keep the measure off the ballot. She called Rapert’s efforts “an existential threat” to libraries and said “local funding is paramount” to libraries’ survival.
County Judge Darryl Mahoney rejected the proposed ballot measure in September.
Rapert has called for the state Legislature to abolish the State Library Board in response to its rejection of his efforts to keep children away from materials he said are “grooming” them.
Sen. Bart Hester of Cave Springs, one of Rapert’s former Republican colleagues and the Senate President Pro Tempore, agreed that “pornography” should not be allowed in libraries and that “a state board that is intent on sexualizing children” should be dissolved if it doesn’t “get on board.”
Another Republican senator, Dan Sullivan of Jonesboro, was the primary sponsor of Act 372 of 2023 and has also said the state should defund ArLA. The nonprofit advocacy organization receives no state funds.
Sullivan has also said the Legislature should “eliminate all the funding for public libraries that have the American Library Association in their policy” during the 2025 legislative session. ALA is ArLA’s parent organization, and its Library Bill of Rights states that access to libraries should not be restricted based on a person’s age. Far-right conservatives nationwide have claimed this statement is proof that the ALA believes in forcing content about sexual activity and LGBTQ+ topics onto children.
A Democrat-sponsored bill introduced for the 2025 session would repeal Act 372 and require public libraries to have “a written policy prohibiting the practice of banning books or other materials because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval” in order to receive state funding. The 2025 legislative session begins Jan. 13.
Saline County residents worried in 2023 that the library’s state funding would be in jeopardy due to the quorum court granting the county judge power over library staffing and finances. They were concerned that the board would be labeled advisory rather than administrative as required by the State Library. Espey told the Advocate those fears did not come true, and State Library Board minutes show the Saline County Library’s allotted funds have remained consistent.
Brigham, the Marion County quorum court member, proposed an ordinance in February 2022 that would have redesignated the county library board from administrative to advisory. The proposal saw public pushback over potential funding loss. It was pulled from the quorum court’s agenda and never received a vote, county clerk Dawn Moffet said this month.
Another requirement for state funding is a library director with a master’s degree in library science. Suzy McVay, the Marion County Library employee tapped as interim manager after Scott’s arrest, does not have this degree.
The State Library allows libraries in Marion County’s position to form agreements with librarians in other counties that have the requisite education. Those individuals would handle certain aspects of library administration, such as reports to the State Library, and allow the local entity to keep receiving state funds.
Stumph said via email that he is considering this option for Marion County.
Impact on library services
If the Lawrence County millage cut had passed, library director Ashley Burris said, the county’s part-time library branches in Lynn and Imboden would have closed, leaving only the main branch in Walnut Ridge. Cuts to staff and programming would also have been necessary, she said.
Coty Powers, who collected signatures for the ballot measure under Amendment 38, said he believed some of the library’s programs were “redundant.” He does not plan to reintroduce the proposal because “the people have spoken,” he said.
Powers and other Lawrence County residents wanted some of the library’s funding to go toward improving county roads instead. Burris said she spoke to several signers of the petition who were under the impression that tax money taken away from the library would immediately benefit the road department.
“I would explain to them, ‘Actually, no, the only thing on this [petition] is to cut library funding,’” Burris said. “They would be surprised by this and end up with a sign in their yard to support the library.”
In Garland County, the proposed 0.6-mill tax reduction would have cut the library’s budget by $1 million and might have forced it to reduce its hours or limit its more expensive services, Webb said.
The Craighead County Jonesboro Public Library cut 13 employees and reduced its hours of operation to adjust to the loss of funding. After the refunding effort in Jonesboro failed in November, director Vanessa Adams said the library’s reserve funds will be necessary to keep the doors open, and she did not anticipate another restoration issue on the 2026 ballot.
Dean MacDonald, who collected signatures for the refunding petition, said county residents should continue to fight the “bad narratives” against the library and highlight its struggles since the defunding.
“If 100 good people want to see [restoring millage] on the ballot in 2026, then it’s absolutely their right and they should do just that,” MacDonald said.
They were so loud with the content argument that we were able to get ahead of the funding argument. Moving forward will be a continuation of that. We will let folks know that the library is not stealing your money.
– Bailey Morgan, an organizer with the Saline County Library Alliance
Meanwhile in Crawford County, the library board and county officials disagree over who is responsible for paying a projected sum of more than $118,000 in plaintiffs’ legal costs after losing the case over the segregation of LGBTQ+ books in “social sections.”
The five-branch library system might have to reduce its broadband internet speed and after-school meal services if it’s forced to shoulder the cost, board chairman Keith Pigg said, but a federal judge has yet to order the payment of the legal fees.
Three parents sued the library in May 2023 over the social sections, saying they violated the First Amendment. Former library director Deidre Grzymala said it was a “compromise” in response to public outcry. The quorum court gave her a $40,000 severance package after her resignation.
Pigg has said the quorum court violated Amendment 38 by paying the severance with library funds without the board’s consent. The amendment states, “No claim against [designated library] funds shall be approved by the County Court unless first approved by the County Library Board.”
Crawford County was also a defendant in the case against Act 372 due to its segregation of books, which ended in October.
Community members have not been complaining about library content since the resolution of the lawsuit, Crawford County Library director Charlene McDonnough said. She and Hector said the citizens of their respective counties that complained about books were usually not library patrons.
“That tells me it wasn’t ever about the books,” said Hector, who plans to take legal action against Saline County for her firing.
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