Protect Huntington Beach delivers signatures against children’s book review board to City Hall
Concerned Huntington Beach residents delivered more than 19,300 signatures against a controversial parent/guardian children’s book review board to City Hall on Monday.
The volunteers gathered at a residence in Huntington Beach, taking 20 boxes of signed petitions to the trunks of two waiting cars. The petitions were headed to be reviewed by the city clerk.
Protect Huntington Beach co-founder Cathey Ryder said her organization has been asking residents to sign petitions for months. The conservative council majority in April finalized approval of Ordinance No. 4318, which formed the board that would have a final decision on which new children’s books would be allowed in the public library.
“This is democracy in action,” Ryder said after several people, including minority Huntington Beach City Council members Dan Kalmick, Natalie Moser and Rhonda Bolton and state Sen. Dave Min, helped with carrying the boxes to the cars. “This is what the United States is about. This is why we live here.”
Monday was the six-month deadline to collect signatures on the petitions. The group needed to collect 13,247 verified signatures — 10% of registered Huntington Beach voters — in order to trigger a special election early next year and let the voters decide on the fate of the yet-to-be-formed children’s book review board, which would feature up to 21 members appointed by the council.
The newly seated City Council, which will be determined in the Nov. 5 election, could also approve the petition outright or ask for a 30-day financial overview before placing it on the ballot, Kalmick said.
Ryder said Protect HB has been verifying that signers are registered to vote, are Huntington Beach residents and that their names match their voter registration, so the group is very optimistic that it has cleared the 10% threshold. After the signatures are finalized by the Orange County Registrar of Voters, a “Vote Yes” campaign for the special election will begin, Ryder said, though verification is not expected to happen until early December after the general election results are verified.
Protect HB teamed with the Bookloose initiative, also based in Huntington Beach, on the effort. Ryder said more than 360 volunteers have made phone calls, protested on Main Street or stood in front of a grocery store collecting signatures.
“We have independents, we have Republicans, we have Democrats who have supported us,” she said. “We don’t believe this is a partisan issue. For me, it’s about giving citizens a chance to vote on an important issue like this. Should we vote on every single thing the City Council does? No … but a decision like this should not be decided by four people. It’s too big.”
Kalmick helped draft the petition language.
“This would not have happened without a groundswell of residents who didn’t see anything wrong with the library, and didn’t want to see politics injected in the library,” he said. “If this makes its way to the ballot, you’ll see a groundswell of folks coming out to protect the libraries.”
Huntington Beach Mayor Gracey Van Der Mark, part of the conservative majority, pushed back on Monday. She noted that no books have been removed from the library, though some have been recatalogued.
“Books are being relocated,” she said. “Librarians move books all the time. I used to work in a library. I used to relocate books all the time. I wasn’t considered a professional book-banner. Yet, if a book is teaching children how to masturbate and we say, ‘Let’s just move that to the adult section,’ they consider it a book ban?”
Some against the parent/guardian review board have said that since it would be able to stop children’s books from entering the library, that does amount to a ban.
Van Der Mark, however, argued that librarians shouldn’t have the ultimate power to make decisions on content.
“Does her piece of paper, her degree, make it OK for her to reject the books?” she said. “But if us parents reject one, we’re banners. That’s actually pretty insulting, to say, ‘Well, you don’t have a library degree, so you’re not worthy of reviewing a book.’ That’s insulting to moms and dads.”
Assembly Bill 1825, authored by Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi (D-Torrance) and co-authored by Min (D-Irvine), was signed into state law by Gov. Gavin Newsom on Sept. 29. Also called the “California Freedom to Read Act,” it would seem to make Huntington Beach’s parent/guardian review board a moot point.
The bill stops library boards from making policies to ban or limit circulation of books because of the views, ideas or opinions in them, or because they contain sexual content.
But Huntington Beach City Atty. Michael Gates has indicated that the city will fight the law, claiming it is unconstitutional.
“I’ve got three kids,” Min said Monday. “When I take them to the library, or when I see them check out books from the library, I look at them. I’m a parent. There are books out there that some parents may not want to have their kids have access to, that I do. They shouldn’t get to determine, because of their own beliefs, what the rest of us get access to. If they are that concerned that their kids have a narrow worldview and are not exposed to anything, then they should be more involved as parents.”
Meanwhile, another petition related to the library continues collecting signatures of Huntington Beach voters. This one seeks to stop possible outsourcing of library operations in the future.
In June, private company Library Systems & Services pulled its bid to manage the city’s library system, a day before the City Council was set to vote on that bid.
The deadline for signatures for the second petition is Nov. 25. Ryder said Monday that it already has about 13,000 to 14,000 signatures.
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