A west suburban library that became a battleground for national culture wars is on the defensive again.
Two years after the Downers Grove library was forced to cancel a planned drag queen bingo over right-wing threats, leaders of the western suburb are considering a controversial proposal to replace the appointed members of the library board with an elected one.
“This will tear our community apart for no reason,” warned resident Debbie Anderson Phillips at a recent emotionally charged library board meeting. “It will be an ugly, ugly, ugly fight.”
Changing the library board is still just a flicker of an idea. But the agitation it has created is perhaps the product of the past seven years in which the six-member library board has endured the removal of two trustees and sustained pressure from local conservatives over LGBTQ+-related programming and materials. That history has some residents worried that a library election would attract outside interest groups seeking to influence local politics.
Mayor Bob Barnett — who has supported the institution’s staff and its programming in the face of previous attacks — is one of the Village Council members backing the pitch, which the village must table or place on the ballot by Jan. 13.
Barnett said residents for years have been asking why the library board is appointed instead of elected, and that there is no harm in exploring the question.
“I believe that there is a way that this could be done where nothing about the library’s operations or finances would change,” he said. “The only question we’re asking is, ‘Should the selection process for trustees (change)?’”
If voters approve the referendum, the outcome will carry no force of law. Barnett and other supporters say the referendum is a first step and not the final word. He insisted that it wasn’t a dig at the library, which has a five-star rating from the Illinois Library Association and he considers almost universally beloved.
“It’s a long process (and) a lot of work for both the library and the village to make a change, work that none of us have time to do unless the community really wants us to,” he said.
Detractors, including the entire library board, argue that the referendum is unnecessary. They say that posing the question has derailed the library’s efforts to leave behind the conflicts that flared in the wake of the pandemic.
“We had been through these turbulent years, and we were excited to just start fresh,” said Trustee Barnali Khuntia. “And literally out of nowhere, we find out that the Village Council has put this on their agenda.”
Out of all the turbulent moments from the last several years, the September 2022 cancellation of a drag queen-themed bingo activity looms the largest in the memory of residents, staff and officials.
The cancellation, which came on the heels of violent threats, was part of a wave of politically charged confrontations around the state and the country as libraries and school boards became new fronts in a post-pandemic culture war.
Elsewhere in Illinois, disagreement over picture books about human anatomy and drag queens brought police to shut down a Lincolnwood Library meeting in late 2022 while a slew of candidates ran for school board in suburbs like Barrington, Oswego and Downers Grove in an effort to pull those boards to the political right on issues like race, gender and sexuality.
When Laura Hois, a co-chair of Awake Illinois Downers Grove, took the podium for her public comment at the Dec. 11 library board meeting, she cited the 2022 cancellation as one of her reasons for backing the referendum and the idea of electing library board members.
“The reason I’m in favor of library board members being elected is that it has been politicized, and that’s the whole problem,” she said. “It has become politicized to the point that drag queen bingo was placed on the schedule as a program for children.”
Resident Robin Tryloff said she feared electing the board would invite the influence of organizations just like Awake Illinois — which has been labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center — onto the library’s board.
“Allowing local politics and voting to influence library services could lead to a situation where the library is used as a tool for partisan agendas, undermining its role as an independent and inclusive space,” she said.
For library Director Julie Milavec, the whole discussion is a return to an era she’d hoped to leave behind.
“These last couple of months, we had thought we’d gotten past it,” she said.
‘No one discussed this with us’
Village Commissioner Michael Davenport first raised the prospect of an elected library board in April, after he voted to remove a controversial conservative trustee, Bill Nienburg, from the board. Nienburg’s removal was the second time since 2017 that the Village Council had intervened with the board’s composition.
Before he cast his vote, Davenport said he felt the council needed to “take a more active role and find better ways to support the library board of trustees” and listed several possible options to advance that goal.
But, he continued, he was “most interested in the library board of trustees becoming an elected body, directly accountable to the voters.”
Months later, facing accusations of rushing the question onto the ballot, Davenport said he had wanted to let the dust settle from Nienburg’s removal. He said the debate had gotten overheated for an idea in such early phases.
“My asking to have a discussion about this is not something that should have sent everybody into total defense mode,” Davenport said. “If the voters want to leave (appointments) with us, then that settles it for me.”
Should the library have to switch to an elected board, there are two possibilities: the library could become its own taxing body or it could have an elected board and remain a subsidiary entity of the village of Downers Grove. The second option would require a change to state library law.
In a letter to the Village Council, the library board of trustees warned it could require significant tax increases to make the library its own taxing body and create a slew of administrative problems.
Library board President Matt Topic said he, the rest of the board and the library staff weren’t opposed to the idea of elections in principle. But before a packed Dec. 3 village board meeting, he said the referendum had blindsided them.
“No one discussed this with us,” he said. “I am holding my tongue to not be unprofessional in just how disappointed I am (with) the way that we, as a fellow entity of government, have been treated throughout this process.”
Barnett, one of four Village Council members who supports advancing the question, said the library’s warnings were “a little overblown,” since he doesn’t support making the library its own taxing body.
“I think there’s a little bit of poor me going on,” he said.
The council is scheduled to take a vote to place the question on the ballot Jan. 7. Early voting for the consolidated municipal elections opens Feb. 20.