Now, a bill sponsored by Rep. Valarie Hodges, a Denham Springs Republican, seeks to add two members to the parish library board to make a total of nine. There are also nine members of the Livingston Parish Council, the local governing body that recently has generally opposed library board decisions on access to materials.
Hodges said in a recent legislative committee meeting that the parish council had urged her to draft the bill — HB 628. The legislation would not apply to other parishes in the state.
“We have recently seen exponential growth within our library system in Livingston Parish,” added Tori Hymel, Hodge’s legislative assistant. “In order to incorporate more opinions, more points of views, to be able to cover the entire parish and all of the different library branches, they were looking to expand it to nine members, so that way there is more representation.”
Garry “Frog” Talbert, a member of the Livingston Parish Council who has criticized the library system, said the council asked Hodges to pursue the bill before the controversy with the library system began mid-2022.
“We just felt that you have a board that is in your area, you should have a voice on that board,” he said. “That was the thought process.”
A different bill by Hodges was nearly identical to HB 628 but contained a provision that appeared to remove all sitting library board members. After some confusion over that bill, it was replaced by the one seeking to add two members to the board, Hodges said.
However, Rep. Matthew Willard, D-New Orleans, suggested the proposal is a political move. During Wednesday’s committee meeting, he noted the high-profile library controversies in Livingston Parish and elsewhere in the state, as well as other library bills filed this session.
“I just have a concern that really all of these bills are making it harder for librarians to do their job, which I think is very important to our society, especially with the literacy rates that we have in Louisiana,” he said.
But Hymel argued the Hodges bill would allow for more representation.
“With this expansion of the board, this does allow for more viewpoints,” Hymel said. “It brings in more diversity of thought and all these other things.”
”My concern is that by increasing the board, you also make it easier to achieve a political outcome objective, if that’s the desire,” Willard said.
Other people who spoke in opposition to the bill echoed Willard’s sentiments.
“It seems like this is a bill [where] if you don’t get the votes you want, you add to your board,” said Lisa Rustemeyer, of Covington. “Politicians have no training in library science. I absolutely don’t want them to be able to stack boards and control what voices are heard and what voices are not heard.”
Sarah Jane Guidry, executive director of the statewide LGBTQ advocacy group Forum for Equality, called attention to the “ongoing battle that is in Livingston Parish.”
“There is a political agenda in terms of expanding, removing and replacing library boards of control,” Guidry said. “This is opening the door for other parishes to continue to come to you to create systems if the one they are currently existing in doesn’t work for them.”
Some of those providing opposing testimony referenced LGBTQ+ books they say have been targeted in the parish.
Last summer, Livingston Parish library board member Erin Sandefur — who now sits on the Livingston Parish Council — named eight books to consider restricting, with content ranging from a preschool-level picture book about transgender identities to a dating guide for teenage boys with a sexually explicit illustration.
Later, the parish president sent a letter to the board asking members to move sexually questionable content from the children’s and young adult sections; the letter was endorsed by the parish council. But the board said it would simply uphold its existing policy for challenging books.
“We just want to keep sexually explicit books out of the children’s section. They should be moved to the adult section. This has nothing to do with LGBT literature,” Sandefur said in a written statement this week. “We did not want to reset the library board, we only want to add two members.”
However, Lynette Mejía, with Louisiana Citizens Against Censorship, said in her testimony that the bill appears to be an effort “to circumvent the will of the sitting board.”
“Livingston doesn’t need more board of control members,” she said. “They need their parish council to stay out of the business of the ones that they have.”
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