(Updates with ACLU comment.)
Saline County Judge Matt Brumley, the county’s chief executive officer, fired library director Patty Hector today after months of controversy over the censorship of children’s books.
After the county’s library board did not fire Hector earlier this year, the Saline County Quorum Court passed a law in August giving Brumley the ability to fire her instead.
Hector had held the director’s position since July 2016.
Hector told the Arkansas Times that Brumley called her at 9:10 a.m. today and said he needed to meet with her in about 20 minutes. He brought the county’s human resources director along, Hector said.
“He just said, ‘Ms. Hector, your services are no longer needed.’ I was jumping for joy. … They’ve been holding this over my head for five months. It was not unexpected.”
“He didn’t even bother to say why,” Hector said.
Hector said she was happy “to get out of that stress,” but she didn’t rule out suing to get her job back.
She said she has hired an attorney, whom she declined to identify. “I’m not going to say anything” further, she added. For now, she said, “I’m going to do something fun. I’ve been in public service for a long time. I’m relieved to be out of it.”
“It was something every day [with county officials] trying to tell me how to do my job after my 38 years of experience and the fact that they want to remove books,” she said. “They want to move them where the children are not able to get to them. … It’s all about the books.
“I don’t know what’s ahead for Saline County, when you have people at the head of the Republican committee in charge,” Hector said.
“I’ve never in my career had anything like this,” Hector said.
Brumley did not immediately return a phone message seeking comment.
County spokesman Trevor Villines said in an email that Hector “is no longer employed” by the county or the library. He said Leigh Espey, who already worked for the library system, has been named interim director.
“We are coordinating a plan to conduct a search for a new library director,” Villines said.
I asked Villines on what grounds Hector was terminated. He has not replied.
In August, the Saline County Quorum Court voted 11-2 to transfer the power to fire librarians from the library board to the county judge, currently a Republican.
Republican justices of the peace were angry over Hector’s refusal to remove books with even vaguely LGBTQ+ themes from shelves of the libraries’ children’s sections to places that are harder for children to find or reach. Brumley and some Saline County JPs have said they lost confidence in Hector after she declined to scrub the library youth sections of books that include gay and gender-nonconforming characters and themes.
Hector has said, though, that the library’s content was already in its appropriate place and moving books to hard-to-access spots was the same as censorship.
The Saline County Library Alliance today issued a statement praising Hector and urging residents to join in supporting public-office candidates who support the library and “positive change” in Saline County. The alliance will “continue to stand by.the library in defense of the First Amendment and the rights of Saline County residents to access information,” it added.
Here is the alliance’s full statement.
Hector said she’d heard one of the library board’s new members “wanted a policy so that it someone wanted us to buy books,” there would be an appeal process when we didn’t buy the requested books.
She mentioned one library patron who often asks the library to buy children’s books. “When we can, we do,” she said. “But we can’t always get the books from the vendor [the library uses]. The library bought some of the dozen or so books the patron recently suggested. Board member Jamie Clemmer, husband of former state Rep. Ann Clemmer (R-Benton) got upset that we didn’t get [all of] them,” Hector said. “He thinks the board should tell us what books to buy.”
Hector said she had checked with other librarians, none of whom has a policy like that. But Hector said she was ordered to draft one nonetheless.
Arkansas law states in part that “No person shall be appointed to the office of county librarian unless prior to appointment the person is recommended for appointment by the county library board, if the board has been created.”
The law further states, “The county librarian shall conduct the library according to the most acceptable library methods.”
What happens if the library board declines to go along with the county judge’s librarian of choice is unclear. And who decides what “acceptable library methods” are — a politician or someone who has studied library science?
UPDATE: “These Saline county officials, who have proved themselves determined to ban books and target their librarian in order to do it, are likely to get an expensive education in the law they could have obtained for free by listening to their librarian and people in the community,” said Holly Dickson, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas.