County politicians could appoint KY library boards more easily under Senate bill
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Bill lets judge-executives reject library board nominee in certain counties.
- Measure follows controversy in Daviess County and earlier Pike County dispute.
- Senate panel approved amended SB 40 letting judge-execs gain power if county opts in.
Kentucky’s county politicians would get greater authority to appoint members of some public libraries’ governing boards under a bill headed to the state Senate floor.
An amended version of Senate Bill 40 would allow county fiscal courts — if they want — to give their judge-executives the power to more quickly reject nominees recommended for the local library board and appoint whomever they choose.
On Wednesday, the Senate State and Local Government Committee voted 10-to-0 to approve the bill.
The bill’s sponsor is state Sen. Gary Boswell, a Republican from Owensboro, where the local library has been ensnared in controversy in recent years.
Board meetings of the Daviess County Public Library have devolved into “total chaos,” with advocacy groups loudly arguing over challenges to books in the library’s collection, residents told the Herald-Leader last year.
As emotions have become heated, so have fights over open seats on the library’s governing board, as each side seeks majority control over library decisions.
“There’s going to be pushback no matter who I pick,” Daviess County Judge-Executive Matt Castlen said last June as he faced two impending vacancies on the library board. “It’s hard to please everybody.”
Boswell in the past has supported conservative challenges to library materials, writing in a 2024 letter to the editor in the Owensboro Times: “Just quit putting books with social agendas or that violate community standards out.”
But at Wednesday’s committee hearing, the senator sat with representatives from the Kentucky Public Library Association and the Kentucky County Judge-Executive Association to announce that his amended Senate bill is a compromise that appears to satisfy everyone.
“It is my hope that this bill will lower the temperature on this whole process,” Boswell told the committee.
Traditionally in Kentucky, most public libraries have been self-governed and self-financed tax districts, with insulated governing boards essentially selecting their own members. To fill vacancies, library boards have recommended two names to the judge-executive, who could select one.
The legislature created an alternative method in 2022 by which fiscal courts could, if they wanted, allow their judge-executives to discard the library boards’ recommendations and select a new board member of their own choosing — but only after two rounds of proposals and rejections that could drag on for months.
Further complicating that process, applications from people interested in serving on library boards went to the Kentucky Department of Libraries and Archives in Frankfort, which forwarded the finalists to the library boards.
That statutory change was made after the Pike County Public Library angered Pike County courthouse leaders by refusing to surrender its downtown Pikeville building to the private University of Pikeville, which wanted it. As an independent body, the public library could not be forced to obey the Pike County Fiscal Court.
As of last year, only 20 of Kentucky’s 120 counties had switched to the alternative appointment method.
Under Boswell’s bill, in a county using the alternative method, the library board would recommend a single nominee, whom the judge-executive could accept or reject for a selection of his own. The Kentucky Department of Libraries and Archives would play no role.
A handful of Kentucky libraries — including Lexington’s and Louisville’s — are not organized as tax districts and therefore are not covered by the 2022 law or Boswell’s bill.
