Librarian protection, rural library bills in limbo with a week left

Yahoo

15-03-2025

At the start of this year's legislative session, lawmakers seemed eager to provide more protections for New Mexico's librarians and ban, well, book bans.
House Bill 27 — a measure that would effectively bar libraries from banning books based on political objections to them or their authors — advanced relatively quickly during the first half of the session.
But after passing through two House committees, HB 27 has sat on the calendar of the state House since Feb. 18. With a week left in the session, Rep. Kathleen Cates, D-Rio Rancho, considers the bill effectively dead.
'If it was put on tomorrow, it's not enough time to get it through the Senate,' she said in an interview Friday.
Cates said she brought the bill in the wake of an unsuccessful effort in 2023 by conservatives in Rio Rancho to take books dealing with LGBTQ+ issues out of the city's library collection. She said it is a public safety issue for librarians who feel physically unsafe when facing controversies over books, and added that goes hand-in-hand with providing the public a 'clear and diverse access of knowledge.'
So, seeing the bill founder once again — Cates introduced the same proposal last year — left the representative 'in the middle of grieving it.'
'I don't know why it is not prioritized to be on the floor, especially during the session of public safety,' she said.
In an email, House Democratic spokesperson Camille Ward said the chamber is 'working diligently to advance legislation that will make a difference for New Mexicans.'
'You can expect us to move quickly through the House Floor calendar as we approach the final days of this session,' she wrote. '... We greatly value our public libraries and the librarians who keep them running.'
Shel Neymark, director of the New Mexico Rural Library Initiative, said another essential component of protecting libraries is increasing funding for the state's smaller, more rural libraries, who he argued face significant risk from assaults on book collection decisions.
Because those libraries tend to operate on shoestring budgets, they often rely on volunteer or part-time, staff, meaning they have little capacity to divert their attention to book challenges.
'Librarians are just overwhelmed and underpaid with the amount of work they do — they do so much in their communities,' he said. '... Putting a lot of energy into a fight like that is not going to be easy for these small libraries if it happens.'
Neymark and others have called on lawmakers to set aside $29.5 million for the state's rural library endowment fund, a currently over-$30 million pot of money they hope to grow to $60 million, enough for $1 million for each rural library in the state.
However, the measure to make that appropriation, Senate Bill 209, faces an uphill battle. Sen. George Muñoz, D-Gallup, the chair of the Senate Finance Committee, indicated before the session the state's spending plan for the coming fiscal year did not account for rural libraries' request, and SB 209 has sat on the Senate Finance Committee's calendar since Feb. 12.
That being said, rural libraries are not necessarily going home empty-handed, should their appropriation to the endowment fund not pass.
Ward pointed to the current draft of the state's proposed spending plan, House Bill 2, which calls for $3.5 million for rural libraries, which would provide $50,000 to each library for spending through fiscal year 2027.
While that wouldn't be the Christmas morning rural libraries were hoping for — Neymark noted it's challenging to hire library staff with that type of appropriation, since it's unclear if a library would get it again in coming years — former Sen. Jerry Ortiz y Pino, who serves on the Embudo Valley Library and Community Center board, said $50,000 is not nothing.
'It's a bird in the hand, and, you know, prospects of having a bush in the future,' he said in an interview.