How One Village Is Attempting Sneakily to Divorce the Library
The speed and method by which the Downers Grove Village Council wants to get a library referendum on the ballot is a sign of the future
Although we just endured a significant election, Illinois is among several states that will have another election in the spring. This year’s is April 1, and on the ballot will be hundreds of school and library board member slots. The Illinois consolidated election will also put several measures on the ballot relating to these two important democratic institutions.
April’s election deadlines came up fast, with most candidates needing to file their paperwork for consideration in late November or early December. These are similar deadlines for ballot initiatives. Each municipality is slightly different. But one thing is for sure: these quick deadlines amid larger-scale distractions, including a presidential election and a later-than-usual Thanksgiving holiday, have helped at least one municipality in Illinois attempt to sneak a measure onto the ballot that could decimate their award-winning, beloved public library.
On November 8, days after the presidential election, the village of Downers Grove, Illinois, posted the agenda for the following week’s Village Council meeting on Tuesday, November 12. On it was new business related to an April ballot initiative the Council hoped to get in for the April election:
“Shall the Downers Grove Public Library become an independent unit of government, with its own levy and a separately elected library board of trustees chosen by and directly accountable to residents of the community?"
The resolution comes as a surprise, as its origination via Village Council meeting is not the process by which Downers Grove Public Library (DGPL) ballot initiatives happen. Either 10% of the population of the village needs to sign a petition to bring a proposal to vote or the Library Board of Trustees would need to vote on a proposal to have it move over to the Village Council.
Neither of these things happened prior to the posting of the November 12 agenda or non-binding referendum proposal.
This isn’t the first time in recent memory that the Village Council has taken action that directly impacts the library without following established procedure. In spring 2024, Library Trustee Bill Nienburg was removed in a 4-3 vote by Village Council. Nienburg had a history of challenging library ongoings*, including being fiercely against the library’s Drag Queen Bingo event (which was ultimately canceled following ongoing threats to the library that included bullets being sent to the library via the postal service). He was supported by groups like Awake Illinois, who has had their eyes on DGPL since their founding in 2021. Awake has a long history of crafting disinformation campaigns around libraries in the Chicago area.
Both the Library Board and Village Trustees voted in April to remove Nienburg from the Library Board following controversial statements and behaviors in his official role.
Nienburg did not get his position on the board through the proper process when he was appointed in June 2022, just months before the Drag Queen Bingo situation. In Downers Grove, Library Trustee appointments should be made collaboratively, involving the entire Village Council at each step. Nienburg, however, was appointed by Mayor Barnett and simply approved by the Council.
DGPL is part of the village of Downers Grove, meaning that the costs of running the public institution is softer on taxpayers and it reduces government infrastructure. DGPL’s set up mirrors many, if not most, of the libraries in Illinois. They have their own budget line within the city’s budget, but they operate with their own Board separate from the Village.
This new proposal would divorce the library from the village, creating a massive tax increase for Downers Grove residents. Among those costs are:
Huge increases in electricity costs
The hiring of two full-time equivalent staff members, one for finance and one for human resources
Increased pension costs for staff
A change in how cash flow works for operations, to the tune of millions of dollars in upfront cost
Negotiating costs and ownership of the library’s parking lot and property lease
In other words, taxpayers would be on the hook for a potential doubling of the tax levy, and the library itself would be impacted by a tighter budget. This is something that would most immediately affect programming. Programming, of course, has been at the center of many conversations about the library since the Drag Queen Bingo non-event of fall 2022.
The November 12 Village Council meeting where the item was first placed on the agenda under new business did not have full Council attendance. Because of this, Commissioner Mike Davenport, who had proposed the referendum, decided to move the discussion until the next meeting.
The Downers Grove Village Council meets the first three weeks of each month, so the item moved to the November 19 meeting. With the full council present at that meeting, the proposal was made into a formal agenda item for the next meeting, Tuesday, December 3, 2024.
It’s noteworthy that the referendum language changed pretty significantly from the November 12 to November 19 agenda. It now reads as follows:
“Shall the trustees of the Downers Grove Public Library be elected, rather than appointed?”
That’s a pretty significant change to be made from one week to the next, and again, the placement of this referendum on the agenda by the Village Council is not standard procedure. Council cannot make decisions on behalf of the library and its own board of trustees, as noted above.
It’s curious how the new language directly addresses where and how library board trustees are selected to serve. Recall it was just earlier this year that an inappropriately-appointed trustee was let go from the position on recommendation by the Library Board to the Village Council, who voted in agreement.
Given that the deadline for ballot measures is less than one week later–indeed, one day before the next scheduled Village Council meeting–that agenda item will be heard without a standard first read and it will go straight to the Council for vote.
So where’s the Library Board in all of this?
Between the item being added as new business for the Village Council November 12 meeting and its passage to the formal agenda December 3, there has been only a single meeting of the Downers Grove Library Board of Trustees. The Library Board meets once a month on the fourth Wednesday. Their October meeting, scheduled for the 23, was rescheduled for November 20; it was the only November meeting, as the fourth Wednesday of November is the day before Thanksgiving.
In other words, the Library Board has had no opportunity to discuss it. Items on the agenda for the 20 were carried over from the rescheduled October meeting, though some individuals on the board spoke with surprise about the referendum at that meeting.
The timing of the Village Council bringing up this referendum cannot be ignored. The Library Board has no opportunity to discuss it. Moreover, because the Village Council member who proposed the referendum pushed the initial discussion from November 12 to November 19, the formal process was once again circumvented. There is now no time for a formal first reading before Council and thus, no due process before the Council needs to vote on the item to meet the December 9 deadline.
There are benefits and drawbacks to either style of library board trustee selection. Appointed officials can mean that the individual or group responsible for appointing the trustee chooses people whose values and beliefs align with their own. For Downers Grove, the process in appointing trustees to the library board isn’t left to the hands of just the mayor with council approval. Instead, the mayor puts forth candidates but they must each be considered by the whole board before a decision is made. That was done inappropriately for Nienburg. Those candidates could, of course, be ones that align with the board’s political persuasions and if the village board is stacked in a single way, that would be reflected in those appointments. But this arrangement ensures as many possible checks and balances as possible in appointments.
Elected boards allow the general public to have a say in who they want to represent them. Unfortunately, as important as these positions are, they are down ballot measures and most people don’t bother going that far. . . if they show up for these midterm/consolidated elections at all. Good board members often keep their seats for several cycles because people simply agree to keep the incumbent. But bad candidates can easily get into these positions when enough aggrieved individuals show up in support of them.
This is where the Downers Grove Village Council’s move becomes even more questionable.
For the November 5 election, the Board put a measure on the ballot because they knew turnout for the presidential election would be much better than the spring election. That measure was about video gaming in local restaurants and had been in the works by the Village Board for over a year. Roughly 29,000 votes were cast on the measure; Downers Grove saw roughly 38,000 voters in the 2024 election. That amounts to about 25% of those who cast a ballot not even bothering to respond to the referendum.
This library measure–an advisory question, like the one above, meaning that it may not happen but that voters have given the Village Council the thumbs up/down on taking action–would bring a fraction of that percentage in voters on the April ballot. It was also under discussion by the Council for less than three weeks, with no formal process undertaken the same way the gambling measure was for over a year prior to its vote.
The revised measure might look better compared to the initial one proposed November 12. However, because it is an advisory question, this referendum opens wide the doors to push forward the suggestions in the initial proposal. If Library Trustees can now be elected, then perhaps that’s a sign the voting population would be open to the idea of separating the library from the city. That’s a slow but steady way to chip away at the library’s ability to stay fully funded, to have staff who are compensated for their work and expertise at competitive levels, and ultimately, reward the far-right local activists who are eager to ensure their voices and votes trample everyone else’s. It won’t matter how beloved DGPL is, as seen in myriad comments in Library Board meeting packets or in recent surveys (or in the library board’s own recognition of how important it is to hire a full-time social worker to support its community!). Just as was the case in places like Alpena, Michigan or Jamestown, Michigan, most people who love their library take for granted that everyone else does, too, and thus, they can be difficult to convince they need to show up to yet another election to vote on a measure that was inappropriately shoved through the system. In DuPage County specifically, most do not realize there are several groups actively engaged in destroying public libraries and school libraries. DGPL’s experiences with Awake are not in isolation.**
Naturally, the responsibility to educate voters about what this referendum means would fall upon the library. The same institution that saw the process of how items rise to the level of attention by the Village Council circumvented entirely so that the Council could put the measure on the upcoming ballot. Teaching your supporters about a measure that you did not create nor support sends a confusing message to voters, to say the least.
There are also three Village Council seats on the April ballot, begging the question of what happens if any one of those seats are filled by those sympathetic to the right-wing rhetoric and moral panic stoked by Awake Illinois against the library.
Although this may read like a long and serpentine situation impacting one large size public library in suburban Illinois, that’s exactly why it is important to illuminate. This isn’t the case of a one-off bad situation. Illinois has an anti-book ban law meant to shore up support for library collections across the state, and Illinois will likely rehear legislation meant to create stronger protections for library workers against violence and harassment in the upcoming session.
That doesn’t mean libraries nor library workers are immune by any means. If this is happening so transparently in a place like Illinois–every moment of this can be traced in the Village Council board agendas, minutes, and recordings^–it is without question happening elsewhere. In states where libraries are under constant attack by politicians, political action groups, and self-important bigots and racists now further empowered after the presidential election, we’ll continue to see the fracturing of institutions of civic engagement and democracy like libraries. These attacks will play out in ways that seem fine on the surface to the average person who isn’t tuning into the goings on of the library (why would most people be–people like their libraries, even if they’re not frequent users!). But anyone who is tuned in and has been watching over the last four+ years will know, these attacks are meant to undermine the ability of libraries to serve every taxpayer in their community.^^
It’s no wonder that there has been story after story in 2024 has been about the closing of libraries or the slashing of their budgets. This list, published in late August, has only continued to grow. Headlines over just the last couple of weeks have shown budget cuts and reduced services in Tompkins Public Library (Ithaca, New York), as well as in Bradford Public Library (Pennsylvania), Everett Public Library (Oregon), and Great Falls Public Library (Montana), where the slashed parts of the library budget were reallocated to the police. Other libraries, like Warren County Libraries in New Jersey, have just had their city council demand that the library make BookLooks reviews available to patrons in their facilities. BookLooks is, of course, the unprofessional “review” site created by Moms For Liberty. This one’s a particularly harsh slap in the face to every professional in that system and to every taxpayer who goes to the library expecting to be met with information, not mis/dis information and right-wing political agendas.
If you’re in or near Downers Grove, it is crucial you have your voice heard at the board meeting next week. Yes, it’s short notice. That’s by design. The Village Board meets Tuesday, December 3 at the Betty Cheever Council Chambers at 7 pm. If you cannot make it in person, write the board an email so that it gets on the public record. You’ll see when and how to submit your comments here, and every comment matters.
The Downers Grove Board of Library Trustees drafted an official statement on Tuesday, November 26 and it was sent to the mayor and Village Council. The library shared it on their social media, and you can read it here.
Notes:
*After he was removed from the board, he had the honor of showing up on Chicago’s right wing morning show. The folks Nienburg follows on Twitter certainly do a great job showcasing the places where he gets his worldview. He is not in any respect a library advocate.
**Moms For Liberty exists in DuPage County, but it’s operating there under the Awake name. There are several other active anti-library groups in the county and in the nearby counties of Kendall and DeKalb. Many originate in faith-based institutions.
^These Council members are not cordial nor especially pleasant toward one another. The minutes are well done, but some of behavior of the Council should be embarrassing to them and the city.
^^Yes, even teenagers who have been attending library-sponsored lock in events since the dawn of teen services in libraries. It’s not something new, no matter what Awake wants you to believe.