Liberty Lake library trustee ousted for wanting board to set library policy
Popular board member Kim Girard was a strong voice against book bans and for library autonomy during prominent controversies. Mayor Pro Tem Chris Cargill said ‘we need new blood’ on the board, which already had two vacant seats.
News Story by Aaron Hedge | RANGE Media
Correction note from RANGE: This story has been corrected to say the Liberty Lake City Council took control over future policy making, not about what books appear on shelves.
No one saw it coming.
In a move that shocked library employees and advocates last week, the Liberty Lake City Council voted Kim Girard — a well-regarded and experienced librarian nearing the end of her first term — off the Liberty Lake Library Board of Trustees. The margin was 4-3. The council did not debate before voting. Girard gave a brief statement at the podium expressing gratitude for the opportunity to serve, the vote was called and seconds later, the trustee was ousted.
“You guys made a serious mistake,” said Library Board Chair Brad Hamblet during public comments shortly after the vote. Girard “is invaluable to the board. Invaluable. Her experience in public education, in a library, in helping set up libraries, in administering libraries — you people made a serious mistake.”
The surprising vote — normally a routine procedure to keep a trustee that takes place at the end of that trustee’s first term — stemmed from a series of controversies that began in 2021 over an effort to ban a book and whether the library board or the city council should control setting library policy. Girard, along with her fellow board members, had advocated that library boards should be inclusive of the community and independent from politics, which rankled conservatives on the city council who felt they should have more direct say over the rules that govern the library.
Two members of the city council told RANGE they voted against Girard because she wanted the trustees to have authority over the rules.
Girard’s library background
Before she moved to Eastern Washington in 2019, Girard had worked for three decades in schools and school libraries in Alaska. During her term as a trustee, Girard was known as a defender of library board autonomy and an advocate of keeping literature for underrepresented communities on shelves.
“Libraries are a bastion of free speech in our country, and it’s a place where anybody can go and gain knowledge,” Girard told RANGE. “You don’t have to be able to afford college tuition to go learn some facts.”
But she was also deeply involved with day-to-day operations, like writing a grant that could help move the library into a new location — a longtime goal, according to Library Director Jandy Humble.
“We do not have many library board members who are former librarians,” Humble, who reports to the library board, told the city council from dais after the vote. “Kim put just as many hours into the library contract this year as I did, and she was not paid for that work. I will feel a significant impact not having her on the library board. I’m very disappointed.”
Difficulty ahead replacing Girard
Humble told RANGE it would be difficult to replace Girard.
“They’re volunteer positions,” she said. “You take any help that you can get, and with Kim, I feel like I’m getting the whole package, and so it feels like a heavier loss in that sense.”
There are two other open positions on the five-member board, which were vacated earlier this year by Teresa Tapao-Hunt and Robert Skattum (both for personal reasons). Applicants are vetted by the mayor, trustees and Humble as library director and recommended for rotating positions by the mayor. The city council then votes to approve or deny them. Girard had been recommended for a second term by Mayor Cris Kaminskas. Kaminskas, who does not vote on the seven-member council except to break a tie, was absent for the vote.
The “about” section of the board’s website reads, “The purpose of the Library Board of Trustees is to help direct the funds and policies of the Liberty Lake Municipal Library. In general, the Board of Trustees will have a role in determining the mission of the library, setting the policy that governs the library, and overseeing the general management of the library.”
The vote is not the final word on Girard’s tenure as a trustee: she may be able to reapply to the position and be voted back onto the board for the next term. She told RANGE she may do so and said that, in any case, she plans to stay involved with the library community and to help Humble carry out her work.
Voting on ideological lines
The four conservatives on the council, Mayor Pro Tempore Chris Cargill and council members Mike Kennedy, Wendy Van Orman and Jed Spencer voted to remove Girard. She said she was surprised Kennedy and Van Orman voted against her.
The three liberal council members, Annie Kurtz, Linda Ball and Dan Dunn, voted to keep Girard. After the vote, they exchanged befuddled glances, and Kurtz lifted her hands in the air. Ball called the vote “outrageous” and said she was “stunned.”
Kurtz said, “No discussion before the vote is not transparent.”
Dunn asked for an explanation from his colleagues, but three of the four city council members did not state a reason for voting no on a second term for Girard.
Kennedy was the only council member to rationalize his vote during the meeting.
“What we don’t need is competitors,” Kennedy said. “What we need is completers. … When we get individuals who come forward and get into the name calling and threatening to sue the city, I, as an individual, start lacking confidence.”
Kurtz and Girard believed Kennedy was accusing Girard of having threatened to sue the city.
After she was voted off the board, Girard defended herself from Kennedy at the dais, saying she had never threatened to sue the city.
‘Not how I live my life’
“I don’t know how you heard I threatened to sue the city,” Girard told Kennedy, “but that’s just not how I live my life.”
In an interview with RANGE, she also said she had never called anyone names.
“I find that so offensive because [Kennedy] doesn’t even know me,” Girard said. “They don’t even know me as a human, and they just assume that because I question them or the library board questions them that we’re troublemakers.”
In an interview, Kennedy said his accusation of threatening to sue the city was not directed at Girard, but he would not say who he had accused of threatening the city. Asked why he voted no on Girard, he again declined to comment. He said any discussion of the vote should be hosted at city council meetings.
“We just decided to not go in that direction,” Kennedy said. “I did not direct it to her personally or any individual personally.” He said he wanted the situation to “evolve” before commenting further and thought any comments that would appear in the press would not “work out well because people are gonna read things into it.”
Bad blood
Turmoil over the library since a resident’s attempt to ban a queer-affirming book in 2021 was so intense that, for a time, then-City Council Member Cargill refused to vote on any recommendations from Kaminskas. Cargill is also the founder of the conservative thinktank Mountain States Center (MSC).
In that role, he consulted on Project 2025, the vast policy framework giving shape to the incoming Trump administration. (Cargill told RANGE MSC’s contribution was simply to tell the framers of Project 2025 what kinds of policies MSC advocates for. He did not know if any of MSC’s recommendations helped shape Project 2025.)
Cargill was more direct than Kennedy about his reasons for voting against Girard.
“My vote was based on the fact that I think we need new blood on the library board,” Cargill told RANGE. “We’ve seen over the past year or two some of the challenges that the board has had with us and that we’ve had with the board as well. My feeling was just that we needed to have a clean slate on some of those issues and try to find folks who would be able to inject some new ideas into the process.”
Asked if he was referring to the controversies over the book ban and library board autonomy over policy, Cargill said, “Yes.”
Challenging books in libraries
Van Orman, a former mayor of Liberty Lake, was also explicit in an interview with RANGE about her reason for voting against Girard. She took issue with the library board’s actions in 2022 after Liberty Lake resident Erin Zasada sought to ban the book Gender Queer — the most challenged book in the United States, according to the American Library Association (ALA). The city council took a vote on the book challenge, choosing to keep Gender Queer in the library. (Cargill and Van Orman voted to ban the book.)
After that vote, the board of trustees clarified, during a regular policy review, the process through which citizens can challenge books in the library. Specifically, the board made it clear that the trustees have the final say over what appears on library shelves. Van Orman did not like this, saying the city council’s vote to keep the book “should have been the end of it.”
“It was from that point on that the current advisory library board changed policy without an approval from the council, taking an opportunity for residents to refute what was in the library,” she said.
Van Orman emphasized that she did not coordinate with the other members who voted against Girard before the meeting.
Who’s in charge?
When it learned the board had clarified its policy, the city council voted to give itself final decision-making power over library policy in December 2023. The board kept its authority as the final arbiter of content. But it was a controversial move, not only because some disagreed with that decision-making structure but also because the conservatives on the board did it during a short window of time during which they had a supermajority that could override a mayoral veto. (Earlier in 2023, the council had tried to implement a similar policy; Kaminskas vetoed that ordinance.)
As RANGE reported at the time, the conservatives on the council argued that citizens should be able to hold decision-makers accountable for what books are in the library. Because the trustees are appointed by the city council in Liberty Lake, voters can’t directly exert power over their decision-making processes. From this perspective, they said at the time, it was more democratic to give policy making authority to people who voters can fire.
This cuts against decades of industry consensus that libraries should be insulated from politics so they can carry material that serves everyone in a given community, including queer people.
Library trustees serve staggered five-year terms and are eligible for one reappointment without reapplying one time. The next trustee who is up for reappointment is Shawna Deane.
No politics on Facebook
After the Dec. 3 vote that pushed Girard off the council, Liberty Lake resident Lynn Atkins forwarded RANGE a message she said she had posted to a private Facebook group called Liberty Lake Community expressing dismay at the vote, writing, in part, “There was no indication, reasons or discussion provided for why they would not approve her prior to the vote.”
Atkins told RANGE it was removed. The group has more than 11,000 members, and Van Orman and Cargill are group moderators. Atkins texted Van Orman to ask why the post was removed; Van Orman replied that her post violated the group’s rules on discussing “politics.”
Van Orman told RANGE the page’s algorithm deletes posts that are reported as violating the rules and pointed out that other, unrelated posts had been removed the same day.
At the Dec. 4 meeting, no Liberty Lake residents spoke in favor of the vote.
Girard told RANGE the vote indicates the city council is still unfairly upset about the library board’s attempts at making its own policy.
After the council had voted to give itself decision making power over the library’s content, “it was like, ‘OK, this is not what we want, but let’s just keep doing our job,’” she said. The city council, by contrast, “hadn’t moved on.”
“I feel like coming after us does not really honor that process of checks and balances that’s a really important part of our government.”
This story was republished from RANGE Media, a worker-owned newsroom in Spokane. Read more of their coverage here.
