A yearslong effort by some local residents to remove or restrict kids’ access to certain graphic novels with mature themes at Garfield County’s six public libraries has been largely unsuccessful so far, even after county commissioners took a larger role in selecting library board members beginning in 2023.
Several measures, including a restricted library card for kids, were considered by library trustees over the past year. But so far, the board has declined to implement any new policies due to reasons ranging from Colorado laws that prohibit restricting certain books to a skepticism over whether there is a genuine problem to be solved when it comes to kids accessing adult books.
This has frustrated those in support of book restrictions who accuse the library district of not responding adequately to their concerns and say they simply want to protect young people from being exposed to what they have described as inappropriate library materials that depict sexual scenes.
Other residents see the local effort as part of a national movement by conservatives to censor books that challenge social norms, especially books by, or about, the LGBTQ+ community or other marginalized groups — and they are relieved that the library board has so far declined to restrict or remove any books.
But with the commissioners’ appointment Jan. 5 of two new library trustees who have openly expressed support for certain book restrictions, and with library district Executive Director Jamie LaRue — a staunch advocate against censorship — about to retire, changes could still be coming.
The book-restriction controversy began in 2023 when Silt resident John Lepkowski and Rifle resident Trish O’Grady started gathering signatures and submitted a petition asking the libraries to implement restrictions to prevent minors from accessing two Japanese graphic-novel series, including one that features LGBTQ+ characters, and all books with publisher-provided parental advisory warnings.
“This has been a long time coming, well over two and a hald years since John and I started to look at these books, but I want to make it clear that it's about specific books, … so don't tell me that this is a slippery slope that's going to slide into all other problems,” O’Grady, who declined a request to be interviewed for this story, said during a library board meeting June 5.
“It's not about censorship of adults — it's censorship of minors and we censor children all the time. We do it at movies, we do it at home, we do it as parents, we do it as teachers — so why not these books?” she said.
When the library board declined to implement the suggested restrictions, the petitioners took their concerns to the Garfield County commissioners, who in late 2023 decided against appointing a candidate to the board that trustees had recommended. In February 2024, commissioners passed a resolution giving them a greater role in interviewing and appointing library trustees — a process that used to be primarily in the hands of the library board.
In response to the increased government oversight, a counterpetition was created by a group called Protect Our Garfield County Libraries asking the county commissioners to reject attempts to restrict books and to return the trustee appointment process to the library board. Former Carbondale Library Trustee Jocelyn Durrance, who was not reappointed last year by the commissioners after she applied for another term, now helps lead the group. Durrance was also a professional librarian in Pitkin County for 30 years.
“I'm a librarian and I have always thought that libraries were a place for everybody — they represent the community, and so you provide materials and events for all members of the community,” Durrance said in an interview with Aspen Journalism and Aspen Public Radio on Jan. 12. “So when the book-banning issue first came up, I thought, ‘This is contrary to what I believe, to what I have based my past 30 years on.’”
“The fact that they were wanting to pull titles off the shelf went against my grain because the library serves all communities, even though some of those members of the community might be in conflict with each other,” Durrance continued. “It is not the library's job to choose a side — it is the library's job to provide information to all parties involved.”
Despite this pushback, however, the county commissioners have continued to oversee the appointments with some limited input from the library trustees — and attempts to create an intergovernmental agreement between the county and the library board to define each entity’s role in the process have been unsuccessful.
Limited by law
The original petition submitted by O’Grady to the Garfield County Libraries asked that the two graphic-novel series and all other material with age advisories be put “in a locked bookcase, placed in an employee area, or in a separate room marked as ‘adult only.’”
The petition also suggested that the libraries require anyone checking out these materials to have identification showing they are at least 18 years old. If these suggestions could not be met, the petition asked that the books and other materials be removed from the county libraries.
With the appointment of three new library trustees early last year, the commissioners for the first time had selected a majority of the board — four of its seven members — and it appeared plausible that this new board would move to approve certain book restrictions.
Brit McLin, a New Castle resident and former fire chief who identifies as conservative, was one of those three new members. He was appointed by the commissioners to finish the final year of a former trustee’s term after she resigned early, leaving the New Castle seat vacant.
During his recent reappointment interview to serve another term, McLin told the commissioners that he and his fellow library trustees had listened to residents’ concerns over books with mature content and discussed a variety of ways to address them.
“The range we looked at has been from burning books to banning books to putting them in separate areas, putting them behind locked glass doors,” McLin said in his Dec. 12 interview with county commissioners. “But we also have a highly trained individual that we retain as [legal] counsel who has told us every one of these that we've brought to him — and his direct quote — ‘would most certainly be denied in a court.’”
“So, regardless of what citizen Brit thinks, board member Brit says, ‘We're going to obey Colorado state law,’” McLin said.
In 2024, the Colorado legislature passed a law that prohibits public libraries from removing or restricting access to books based on “partisan or doctrinal disapproval of the library resource.”
The law requires public libraries to “prohibit discrimination” based on factors such as age, disability, race and gender identity when selecting or reconsidering a book or other library resource. It also requires libraries to establish written policies and procedures for handling book-removal requests that comply with Colorado law.
According to LaRue, Garfield County Libraries had established a policy for handling such requests before the state law passed, but they updated the policy in August 2024 to comply with new state requirements including that a specific book can be challenged only every two years and a person submitting a request must reside in the “legal service area” where the library district is located.
“It is the responsibility of a public library to challenge censorship in the fulfillment of its responsibility to provide information and enlightenment,” the law states.
Tony Hershey, an attorney who formerly served on the City Council in both Glenwood Springs and Aspen, was also appointed to the library board by the commissioners last year and agrees that the law prohibits removing or restricting certain books.
“The library board can't just say, ‘OK, we're not going to carry, I don't know, “The Catcher in the Rye” anymore — we're just going to remove it from our shelves.’ That’s not how it works; the law prohibits that,” Hershey told Aspen Journalism and Aspen Public Radio in an interview Jan. 16. “So you can go to the library and challenge a book, but there are rules and there’s a process, … and there can't be any discrimination, and it can't be based on sex and sexual orientation.”
A potential ‘compromise’
In addition to his commitment to following the law, Hershey believes that it is not the library district’s responsibility to decide what young people are allowed to check out.
“I'm not in place of a parent,” Hershey said. “If you don't want your kid to go to the library and look at things that aren't appropriate, then you should be with him in the library.”
But Hershey also acknowledged that there might be a legally sound compromise that would potentially satisfy some concerned parents and citizens without infringing on the rights of other adult library patrons. Specifically, Hershey said he’s interested in the implementation of a library card for minors that would restrict them from checking out books with publisher-provided parental-advisory warnings.
“What you hear from some people is that they’re concerned with some of these materials that children have access to — so what would be a solution to that? A card that was just for kids,” Hershey said. “I think it probably doesn’t solve all of the concerns we’ve heard because kids could still look at these books [without checking them out], but I thought it was an interesting compromise.”
The idea was vetted by the library district’s legal counsel as being in compliance with Colorado law. It was also supported by former Rifle Library Trustee Myrna Fletchall, who was appointed by the county commissioners in 2024. During a library board meeting in June, Fletchall suggested that the board take action on implementing the new card, but she resigned early from her position before a formal vote was held on the matter in August.
Hershey was the only library trustee who voted in favor of the restricted card for kids, but the board agreed they might revisit the idea in the future and look at other ways to address some residents’ concerns that are within the law.
“If it’s a protecting children issue, I’m happy to look at any solutions people have,” Hershey said. “Whether it’s a child library card, more supervision in the children's section, requiring young children to be with a parent or a guardian so they don't look at stuff that’s not appropriate, I’m fine with all that.”
‘Looking for a problem’
For McLin, his decision not to support a restricted library card for minors was due, in large part, to his increasing skepticism over whether there really is a problem at the libraries when it comes to kids accessing books containing mature content.
“You remember being a kid worrying about the monster under the bed that wasn't there?” he said in an interview with Aspen Journalism and Aspen Public Radio on Jan. 22. “To me, this seems like a solution looking for a problem to solve.”
When McLin first joined the board of trustees last year, he visited each of the Garfield County libraries, talked to people with different views about restricting books, and investigated how often the graphic novels with mature themes had been checked out in recent years — and he did not find evidence that kids were at risk in the libraries.
“The books in particular that Trish [O’Grady] and others are complaining about have only been checked out a couple of times, … and since some of these same people have been bringing those books to public comment [at the library board meetings], I have a suspicion who’s checked them out,” McLin said.
“What I think is ironic is that if a book is not checked out, it eventually goes on the giveaway shelf, … but if people keep checking a book out, we keep it on the shelves,” he said.
Over the past year, McLin also read up on library laws and researched efforts to censor books across the country.
“Nationwide, some of the titles that have been requested to be removed or locked up or banned include ‘Harry Potter’ for celebrating the ‘dark arts.’ ‘Charlotte's Web’ has been on the list because talking animals are considered ‘demon worship,’ and ‘Winnie the Pooh’ because it celebrates ‘overeating and bad habits,’” McLin said. “So, it's a slippery slope, and you gotta be clever about what shoes you wear when you step onto it.”
McLin was dismayed to learn during his research that some library staff across the country had been fired for refusing to remove certain books, including in Colorado. In some states, librarians have been threatened with physical violence, lawsuits and criminal charges for having what some consider to be “inappropriate” books that are accessible to children.
In Garfield County, some residents have made public statements calling for LaRue, the library district’s executive director, to be fired, and in 2023, a resident berated a staff member and accosted a library patron wearing an LGBTQ+ Pride T-shirt, according to LaRue.
This kind of behavior is something McLin also experienced several months into his first term on the library board last year.
“I was just going to the grocery store in Rifle and this lady walked up to me, got really in my space … and screamed at me that I am ‘a pedophile and a Marxist,’” McLin said. “I had no idea what she was talking about, but it turns out that it was about the library.”
“It became very apparent early on that there are some people that are not going to like you and are going to do everything they can to disparage you and convince you to quit, so that there’s a vacancy [on the library board] and they can hopefully get someone of their choice appointed,” he continued.
But McLin said the disparaging encounter did not discourage him from applying for another term on the library board — and he was successfully reappointed in a 2-1 vote by the county commissioners Jan. 5.
“I was encouraged by it, to stay and do as good a job as I can, you know — I do not suffer bullies,” McLin said. “There’s a couple of things that you really have to be to sit on this board — you have to be able to take in new information and process it, and you have to have an ironhide.”
New trustees
In addition to reappointing McLin, the Garfield County commissioners also chose two new trustees Jan. 5 to fill open library board seats in Rifle and Parachute-Battlement Mesa: Ed Green and Cindy Bjerstedt.
Green, who served on the City Council and as mayor of Rifle, was also a Garfield County manager before that and helped oversee the public library system.
“As far as me personally, the things that you need to know are that I’m an evangelical Christian, … and that is the most important part of my life,” Green said during his interview for the library trustee position Dec. 12. “I'm a conservative, I'm an Army veteran … and I'm a native of Colorado.”
Bjerstedt and her husband, who live in Battlement Mesa, decided to move from Ohio to Colorado about 10 years ago to be closer to family, nature and the outdoor activities they enjoy such as skiing.
“My kids are grown. I just had my first grandchild. I've been a foster mother, and I’ve adopted a couple of my foster kids — so children are very important to me, and protecting them is very important,” she said in her interview Dec. 12.
Bjerstedt has worked as a physician assistant for 42 years, including at Grand River Health, where she still works part-time.
“So now I have a little bit more time to devote to volunteer activities,” she said. “When I was in Ohio, I wasn't working full-time while I was raising children, so that's why I was able to be involved on the school board and in my state professional association.”
Asked by the county commissioners during her interview in December whether she’d support the libraries enacting a policy for books similar to the rules they have to protect children from material on the internet that is deemed “harmful to their beneficial development,” Bjerstedt said she’d support the idea.
“We’re not talking about ‘Harry Potter’ books here, right? We're talking about books that I've seen that are very sexually exploitative of children, and I believe that those need to be kept away from them,” she said. “Given the field that I work in, and the children that I fostered and adopted, who have been affected by sexually exploitative material — I know people that have been groomed by such material.”
Asked the same question during his interview, Green also said he’d support such a policy if appointed to the library board.
“I hear the argument all the time: ‘It’s really the parent’s responsibility to monitor that,’ but once they get into that library, they’re our responsibility,” Green said. “I think we have an absolute requirement to protect those kids in the library, not only from the content, but from any perp that might be hanging around to influence them.”
Government oversight
Local residents who want the libraries to restrict access to certain adult books have been largely supportive of the commissioners taking a more active role in the trustee appointments in recent years, although some such as Lepkowski, who helped launch the initial petition to restrict books and frequents the Silt library, continue to vent their frustrations over what they see as the libraries’ inaction.
“I think that the library, 99% is just fantastic, but it looks like we have not addressed — and it looks like the issue won't be addressed for a while in the Silt library — the obscene books not in view of the library person at the desk,” Lepkowski, who declined a request to be interviewed for this story, said during public comment after the commissioners made their most recent library board appointments Jan. 5.
In a written statement shared with Aspen Journalism and Aspen Public Radio on Jan. 21, Commissioner Perry Will acknowledged that the book-restriction issue remains a concern for many in the community.
“The board does not advise the library district on operations of the libraries or direct specific actions, but we as commissioners have expressed we do not wish for children to have access to adult books,” Will said. “We know the libraries have always taken care to protect access to certain books. The discussion regarding this has opened up a community dialogue that indicates great interest in the topic.”
Residents who are against restricting books, such as Durrance, have been alarmed by what they view as the commissioners’ active support of an attempt to push a conservative “political agenda” at the libraries.
“I do think that their ulterior motive was to stack the board with people who would support censorship in the library starting off with the whole ‘book banning’ issue,” Durrance said in an interview Jan. 12. “The responsibility of appointing library trustees has always been with the county commissioners, but it was only about two years ago they decided that they wanted to take the entire process over.”
During public comments after the commissioners made their most recent library board appointments Jan. 5, Glenwood Springs resident Ellen Dole also expressed her hope that the commissioners would base their future decisions on not only an applicant’s resume, but what she sees as more meaningful criteria such as an “unreserved love of libraries” and a recognition of their essential role in “personal growth, civic engagement and our civil society.”
“I had wanted to ask that you would ensure that the trustees you selected today have demonstrated through their past actions, that they are continual and consistent users and lovers of the Garfield library system, you know, not one-time users, not infrequent users, not persons who want to focus on things like limiting access to books,” Dole said. “I think successful trustees are those who embrace the diversity of our population, encourage learning and the sharing of stories, and who want to continually expand the library’s role in bringing our county together.”
Dole also told the commissioners that she wished they would have more public discussion about why they are choosing a specific candidate or deciding not to reappoint an incumbent trustee to another term.
“You had some good, really excellent candidates, and although you focused on some specific criteria with the individuals that you selected, you know, I do wish there had been a little bit more detailed discussion for the public to understand what was behind your decision process,” Dole said.
In response to some of these concerns and suggestions, Commissioner Tom Jankovsky said he and his fellow commissioners have done their best to choose qualified candidates who also bring varying perspectives to the library board, with some input from current library trustees.
“I think there was ‘group think’ on that library board, and I think it’s more open minded, or I should say there’s more willingness to talk back and forth,” Jankovsky said in an interview with Aspen Journalism and Aspen Public Radio on Jan. 23. “We still hear from some constituents that maybe they want more changes, but that’s really not up to the county commissioners, that’s up to the library board.”
In his written statement, Will added: “It is our hope that the libraries consider all sides of topics that come before them, and that the outcome is a vibrant library system that serves the whole community.”
But LaRue, the library district’s executive director, feels that previous library boards also had a willingness to consider a range of viewpoints and community concerns even when they didn’t act on them due to factors such as state laws and long-standing library principles to protect access to a diversity of books.
“I think that the whole idea to frame the library as being partisan or biased is just a false narrative,” LaRue said. “There’s always been a diversity of thought even though we had no idea who was ‘liberal’ or who was ‘conservative’ before.”
Uncertainty ahead
In September, the county commissioners rejected the latest version of an intergovernmental agreement with the library board that would outline a formal process for appointing future trustees.
This was due, in large part, to disagreements over an included proposal from the library board that incumbent trustees applying for another term should be automatically reappointed unless they have not adequately performed their duties.
Commissioner Mike Samson, who did not respond to an interview request for this story, has been steadfast in his rejection of this proposal. He was also the only commissioner that did not move to reappoint incumbent library trustee Brit McLin.
“And this is tough, because I’ve known Brit ever since I’ve been a commissioner in the job that he did for the fire district and so on in New Castle,” Samson said during the Jan. 5 appointments.
According to a statement from the Garfield County Attorney’s Office shared with Aspen Journalism and Aspen Public Radio on Jan. 21, there are currently no plans in place to reconsider another draft of the intergovernmental agreement as the two parties “are at an impasse.”
With no formal agreement signed, two new trustees on the board, and the library district’s executive director retiring in April, the future of the libraries and the controversy over whether to restrict certain books is uncertain.
Despite his concerns over increased censorship across the country, LaRue remains cautiously optimistic that the current library board will choose a qualified candidate to replace him and will continue to protect the “freedom to read.”
“I'm concerned about the role of libraries in American society and the very pointed, partisan led effort of the Republican Party that is sponsoring all kinds of legislation across the country to criminalize books and to criminalize people who provide access to them,” LaRue said. “But so far, Garfield County is doing a wonderful job of resisting this kind of attempted denigration, and … I think we’ve done a good job of holding to our policies, keeping calm and carrying on.”
For his part, McLin hopes to move beyond the controversy over restricting books. In his second term on the library board, he hopes to focus on ensuring that the libraries continue responding to changing technology and needs in the community, including by increasing partnerships with outside organizations such as Colorado Mountain College and the Lift-Up food pantry, so that they remain a valued resource into the future.
“I think the real story is not the controversy — the real story is all the things that the public libraries are already doing and can keep doing for our community,” McLin said.
