Huntington Beach City Council orders studies on library initiatives

The Huntington Beach City Council has unanimously voted to further study a pair of library initiatives, as the battle over the city’s public library system rages on.

Volunteers collected thousands of signatures last year seeking to repeal a parent/guardian children’s book review board, as well as require voter approval before any future attempts to outsource library operations to a private company could occur. After official counting by the Orange County Registrar of Voters, both petitions met the minimum threshold last month.

On Tuesday night, the conservative City Council accepted those signature counts and also accepted city staff recommendations to order a report on the effect of each of the proposed initiatives before making a decision.

The panel voted 6-0, with Councilman Tony Strickland absent, to order the reports. They are required within 30 days and would likely be presented at the Feb. 18 City Council meeting.

At that point, the council can either adopt the initiatives as written, set a date for a special election or put the issues on the ballot for the general election in 2026 — all options that were available on Tuesday night as well.

Paula Schaefer, a Huntington Beach resident and Friends of the Huntington Beach Public Library volunteer who was an official proponent of the second petition regarding privatization, collected signatures for both. She said the process has been delayed a bit, but she is hopeful.

Empty shelves are shown in the youth restricted books area at the Huntington Beach Central Library in February 2024.

(Don Leach / Staff Photographer)

“We really didn’t think that [the council adopting the initiatives] was probably going to happen,” she said. “But, with 17,000 signatures on each petition, I think the City Council should understand that there is broad support for both of these petitions. It wasn’t just [Democrats] who signed this.

“There were many people who came up to me and came up to the other volunteers and said, ‘I voted for these guys. I didn’t vote for this stuff’ ... A lot of very apolitical people signed these petitions, in my opinion.”

Despite delaying a decision Tuesday night, many of the council members made their feelings on the petitions known. Councilman Casey McKeon said he had heard from residents that the petitions were signed under false pretenses.

“They were being told, for example, that we were going to sell the library, which of course is absurd,” McKeon said. “All that exercise was, we were looking for operational efficiencies in every single department ... and that’s now a moot point [after Library Systems & Services pulled its bid].”

Councilwoman Gracey Van Der Mark said she approached the volunteers, disguised in a baseball cap, and heard similar claims.

But Schaefer said the volunteers had training sessions and were told to be careful with the language they used.

“I did hear that somebody did say that the building or the land could be sold, but that was corrected,” she said. “The person was instructed that no, privatization doesn’t mean that. In my opinion — and I was out there many, many hours — we were always careful to say that privatization here means that a private company could take over the staffing and management of the library, but the city would still own the building and run the facilities.”

Schaefer said that people came up to her repeatedly and asked if the library was going to be sold or closed.

“I don’t know where they were hearing that,” she said. “It was not from us.”