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Censorship and scandal in Bradford County [1]

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Date: 2023-09-27

Context:

Bradford County, Pennsylvania is not dissimilar to other big, rural east coast counties. It has a population of about 60,000, a rich history of small farms and small towns. It’s got 7 school districts, all of which cover a pretty extensive tract of land. It’s a fairly conservative area, with a slowly shrinking population fueled largely by younger generations moving out of the area and prohibitive costs making child-rearing daunting for those remaining. It’s a big hunting destination, with some recreational fishing on the banks of the Susquehanna River and a few manufacturing facilities dotting the landscape that haven’t closed up shop.

It has a history of resource extraction: first coal in its southern mountains, then lumber, and in 2010 it became a boom town thanks to natural gas exploration. Some of the local landowners got wealthy leasing their land for drilling, and anyone looking for work could get it for a few years. Housing costs went up as workers from Louisiana and Oklahoma, among others, swarmed in. The boom calmed down, with dwindling royalties going to landowners and “Impact” money going to municipalities. Otherwise, the local economy is largely back to where it started.

The county reliably votes for Republicans statewide with a 65-35 split, and according to state law minority parties must have representation on county commissioner boards, so the board is always split 2-1.

The meat of the story:

It’s a small county, with something like 8% poverty rate and 9 libraries. The 8 ‘local’ libraries are spread out geographically, largely corresponding to the central boroughs that house the school districts. They’re generally small, welcoming, and rely solely on the auspices of their communities for funding.

The ninth library, and the subject of this story, is the county library. Close to 90% of its funding is from the county, roughly $410,000. State law requires it, as the headquarters of the library system, to be open 65 hours a week and it employs about 6 people, four of them full-time. It also supports a bookmobile that travels the county going to nursing homes, public events, and schools. The downside? It’s parked near the geographic center of the county, with no large towns nearby. It’s actually almost exactly between the towns of Towanda and Troy, each with their own library.

On August 31, senior staff at the library were informed in a meeting by the three commissioners that the library would be closing down by the end of the year. The local newspaper was given a leaked paper stating that the decision to close the library was the result of a “secret meeting” by the commissioners a week prior, with the phrase “this is confidential” on the paperwork.

The story blew up over that weekend. The commissioners stated that they were worried about finances, saying that closing that library and redistributing roughly half its budget to the other 8 would be a more efficient use of resources. The more than 40,000 books and resources at the library would be sold off, trimmed down to about 6,000 total, and the bookmobile would be “reimagined” as a “story-mobile” catering to children.

The backlash:

The staff at the library were naturally non-plussed. They felt the library was utilized quite often by residents of the community. They cited their own internal numbers, such as saying 57,000 resources, physical and digital, had been checked out in the last year. They also leaned on their accessible geography, noting that they were one of the few libraries in the county situated on flat ground with a large parking lot, making it an ideal destination for persons of mobility issues. They had even tracked the numbers, noting that an average of nearly 300 people a month with mobility issues visit the location each month.

One staffer went so far as to say the Library had been on one commissioner’s “chopping list” for years. Staffers also said that, according to their estimates, they’d saved residents more than $600,000 the previous year, assuming every resource checked out at the library would have otherwise been purchased.

Individuals related the closing of a library with recent Republican book-banning obsessions, and they were backed up by the commissioners stating the books left for the bookmobile would be screened to make sure they were “appropriate.” After all, if you can’t ban the individual books just shutter the whole library.

The commissioners seemed surprised and annoyed by the backlash. They pushed back against the phrase “closing the library” in a press conference, stating that the building would still be used, just the librarians would be fired and all the books would be sold. They said the building would serve as a “community center” with its computers still available to the public. That’s technically keeping the building open, but it’s still closing a library.

They also announced their new plan for the building: housing the county’s Department of Veteran’s Services, a one-person department currently sequestered in a difficult-to-reach office on a hillside with next to no parking at all. One commissioner stated on the record to a news organization that he wished to see the library used as “a private internet cafe”. That statement has since been walked back by one of his colleagues, saying that was his own “individual idea.”

Anger swelled at the apparent indifference to the public outcry. A change.org petition was started that gained more than 4,000 signatures in less than a week, with more gathered on a physical printout at the library. The local newspaper noted that such a decision by the commissioners, apparently made in secret amongst themselves with no public input, was likely a violation of the state’s Sunshine Act.

The regular meeting of the commissioners was moved to a larger venue due to the swelling interest in the proceedings. For more than 2 hours they were hammered by voices young and old, from across the county. Commissioners dismissed the petition numbers out of hand, accusing it, without inspection, of being full of respondents from outside the county.

Several pointed out that by promising the prime real-estate to the Department of Veteran’s Services, the commissioners had attempted to construct an “us vs them” narrative: being pro-library would mean being anti-veteran.

The county does not contain a bookstore, though a Barnes and Noble lies 30 minutes north of the border with New York.

The Endgame.

Bradford County is a county of poor and poor-adjacent people, boasting a median household income of $54,000. It also has a budget of $83 million in 2023.

It’s not a tax and spend county, and the current commissioners are proud of their legacy of keeping taxes low. It’s expenses have shrunk in recent years thanks to their swift privatization of the county Children and Youth Services and its county-run nursing home, the former Bradford County Manor. Selling the manor alone took $14 million in expenditures off the books and netted the county $9 million for the year. Revenue is also on the upswing, with a record $7 million in “Impact” money from natural gas drilling and more than $11 million in American Rescue Plan disbursements.

Despite this, the commissioners remain firm that the best way to avert a budget deficit crisis in the coming years is cutting off funding to the library. Two of the commissioners have served on the board for more than 15 years.

After fierce pushback, the commissioners decided to form an “advisory committee” to determine the “current and future uses of the library”. But everyone, including its staff, is operating under the assumption that it will close by New Year’s.

The committee includes 4 representatives from 3 of the local libraries on the board, though they’re all standing to gain $25,000 in new money for their own institutions if the county library is shut down. Library advocates are already calling it a kangaroo court.

So far, despite public outcry, the commissioners have remained firm. The county solicitor has defended the “secret meeting”, calling it no more than “information gathering”, though it was still likely a direct violation of the sunshine act.

It’s likely they’ll muscle through the closing despite widespread disapproval, including in a poll on a local newspaper website.

It’s unclear what happens now. Local advocates have mostly returned to their “be sure to vote them out in November” trenches, but again, 65-35.

The fight goes on in little old Bradford County, PA.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/9/27/2195884/-Censorship-and-scandal-in-Bradford-County

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