When I showed up to the hearing on House File 274, the bill to make Iowa libraries subject to exactly the same standards on obscenity applied everywhere else, it seemed that the opposition was well-funded and well-organized. But as I sat at the table, waiting for my turn to speak, I knew it didn’t just seem like the other side of the issue was well-funded. I knew they were well-funded, and I knew that some of that funding had come from my wallet.
In Ames, the Iowa Library Association and American Library Association are funded with public tax money. (It’s probably the case in your town too; try doing a public records request to your city for payments in the last year or two to the ILA and ALA.) Memberships are purchased with tax dollars. Conference tickets, which seem to be a big money maker, are purchased with tax dollars. Travel is purchased or reimbursed with tax dollars, and yes, hotel rooms and meals on the road are purchased or reimbursed with tax dollars. Is this legal? Iowa Code 68A.505 prohibits the use of public moneys for political purposes. I’m no law professor, but that section of the Iowa Code seems to prohibit handing my tax dollars to a highly political organization like the ALA or ILA.
Do Public Dollars Belong in Public Libraries? I haven’t seen any such signs. The sloganeers must be on sabbatical.
Once the public dollars have found their way into the coffers of the ILA, just what does the ILA do with that money? One thing they do is organize astroturf campaigns in collusion with book publishers and the ACLU. They hire law firms to try to overturn the bills that you worked to get passed into law. Before Mark Lambert, Ames City Attorney, decided that the political activist organization the City is funding is very very private, and very unrelated to public employee duties at the library, and that any e-mails it sends to libraries are therefore exempt from Iowa Code Chapter 22, he did order the release of a partially-redacted e-mail. In it, ILA leader, and soon-to-be ALA President Sam(antha) Helmick told members that the ILA had been working for nearly a year with big book publishers (who gain financially from continuing to sell these books to your local library) to astroturf opposition to Senate File 496:
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For nearly a year, the Iowa Library Association has been quietly working with Random Penguin House [sic] and the ACLU of Iowa to provide intel, seek plaintiffs, and promote their work in area media. We connected them with the ALA Office of Intellectual Freedom as well as the Freedom to Read Foundation. Theresa from the FTRF has shared how Chapter Associations have been signing on as an amicus brief when legal recourse is applied to resolve problematic (murky) legislation. This drafting work is a membership/chapter benefit and iis [sic] pro bono.
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ILA members were desperate to keep more of this information from getting out. After receiving a public records request, an Ames Library employee responded thusly:
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Hey Sam – We just got a public records request last week, so receiving this type of stuff at my work
email is top of mind for me. Could you resend to people’s personal emails so that future
conversation happens on more private servers
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That’s your tax dollars at work: secretly paying for attacks against you!
– Chris Campbell
Ames
