Tag: Seattle Public Library

City Council, Elections, LGBTQ+

Council Candidate Backed Republican Smiley for Congress, Kirk Cameron’s Anti-“Woke” Event Spurred Successful Protest Fundraiser

1. Seattle City Council candidate Kenneth Wilson, running to replace one-term council member Alex Pedersen in District 4, supported Republican Tiffany Smiley over US Senator Patty Murray in the 2022 election, according to campaign finance records as well as Wilson’s response to a lightning-round question at a recent forum sponsored by the 36th District Democrats. At the forum, held on May 23, Wilson indicated “no” in response to the question “Did you vote for Patty Murray”; as the senator’s GOP opponent, Smiley flirted with election denialism and ran as an anti-abortion candidate.

Wilson also donated $500 to Smiley’s campaign last October, according to federal records. During his first run for council in 2021 against incumbent Position 9 Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda, Wilson said he was motivated to run by crime and the presence of “ghetto-type paintings” all over the city.

His opponents include Maritza Rivera and Ron Davis. Rivera, a deputy director of the city’s Office of Arts and Culture whose husband, political consultant Dan Kully, worked on former mayor Jenny Durkan’s campaign, is aligned with Harrell; Davis, who contributed to Harrell’s opponent, Lorena González, is running as a progressive urbanist. Durkan contributed $300 (the legal maximum) to Rivera, her first campaign contribution since 2015, when she gave $125 to the short-lived council campaign of Mian Rice, the son of former Seattle mayor Norm Rice.

Wilson has raised more than any of his opponents so far—about $65,000.

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2. About 200 people showed up to see former TV star Kirk Cameron speak at the downtown Seattle Public Library last week, after the library rented a meeting room (subsequently upgraded to the main downstairs auditorium) to the former teen star. As PubliCola reported exclusively earlier this month, Cameron is promoting his appearances, in which he reads from his children’s book, as “a wholesome alternative to the Drag Queen Story Hours promoted by woke Marxist librarians.”

Cameron has said homosexuality is “unnatural,” believes women who have abortions are “murderers,” and has said public schools are “sexualizing” and “grooming” kids, a common trope among right-wing fringe groups. The library told PubliCola it would amount to “government censorship and a violation of the First Amendment” to refuse to rent a meeting room to Cameron’s group.

In a silver lining, the fundraiser raised more than $5,000 in pledges for Drag Queen Story Hour, the American Library Association’s LeRoy C. Merritt Humanitarian Fund (which provides financial assistance for library staffers who lose their jobs for defending intellectual freedom; and Libraries for the People, an anti-censorship group.

According to one attendee—who helped organize a fundraiser to raise money for pro-library organizations—Cameron started his children’s book reading by delivering a “15 minute lecture on America’s tallest granite monument.” (Cameron is so obsessed with this obscure monument, known as the Forefathers Monument, that he made a documentary about it (!) and even sells “high-density resin” replicas of it (!!) for $200 (!!!) on his website. It’s so weird it would almost be charming, if the message of the monument wasn’t that the US is meant to be an explicitly Christian nation).

After that, he brought out the Bremerton coach who won a $2 million settlement after he was fired for holding prayers on the field during football games and led the crowd in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and singing “God Bless America” before reading two of his children’s books promoting “traditional family values.”

At one point, according to the attendee, “Cameron pointed to the sky and asked the audience, ‘who loves you the most?’ and a kid in the audience yelled ‘Obama!'”

The library had security on hand, along with Seattle Police Department officers, to respond to potential protests. On Tuesday, library director Tom Fay issued a bland statement calling the event “a learning experience for all” and thanking library staff for their work to “minimize disruption and reduce the use of Library resources needed.”

In a silver lining, the fundraiser raised more than $5,000 in pledges for Drag Queen Story Hour, the American Library Association’s LeRoy C. Merritt Humanitarian Fund (which provides financial assistance for library staffers who lose their jobs for defending intellectual freedom; and Libraries for the People, an anti-censorship group.

Women

Seattle Library Rents Room to Kirk Cameron, Right-Wing Crusader Against “Woke Marxist Librarians”
Poster image from the 2014 movie "Saving Christmas," starring Kirk Cameron.

By Erica C. Barnett

On May 27, the Seattle Public Library will rent a 200-person meeting room to Kirk Cameron, the ‘80s TV star-turned-evangelical Christian activist, who’s promoting his conservative Christian children’s book as part of his publisher Brave Books’ “Freedom Island Tour.”According to Brave Books’ website, the tour—which only includes a handful of stops, including on in San Francisco—provides “a wholesome alternative to the Drag Queen Story Hours promoted by woke Marxist librarians.”

The Seattle Public Library stopped holding Drag Queen Story Time several years ago.

PubliCola broke the news about Cameron’s appearance on Twitter last Friday. On Saturday, the library issued a statement about its decision and invited the public to submit comments and questions about the event.

Contacted about Cameron’s appearance on Friday, a spokeswoman for the library said SPL isn’t “hosting” Cameron or endorsing his views, but providing his group access to a meeting room that’s available for anyone to rent. “We do not choose who gets to use our meeting rooms or what they are allowed to say or believe. That would be government censorship and a violation of the First Amendment. The Library is committed to intellectual freedom,” the spokeswoman, Laura Gentry, said.

“This was a fairly standard procedure meeting room booking request, however the event itself is likely to be more high-profile than most other room bookings and is likely to require additional Library resources due to the anticipated public interest,” a library spokeswoman said. Those resources could include extra security to insulate Cameron from protesters.

This mirrors the American Library Association’s policy on meeting room rentals, which says that banning hate speech in library meeting rooms would be tantamount to banning Drag Queen Story Time (something many libraries across the country have, in fact, been forced to do because of protests by right-wing groups). “If libraries kowtowed to the exclusive tastes of patrons, our cherished institutions would cease to exist,” according to an ALA opinion piece.

Cameron has said homosexuality is “unnatural,” opposes women having jobs outside the home, has called women who get abortions “murderers,” and said he believed that two recent deadly hurricanes were God’s punishment for people’s sins.

He has also said that public schools are “sexualizing” and “grooming” kids, a common trope among right-wing fringe groups.

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“This was a fairly standard procedure meeting room booking request, however the event itself is likely to be more high-profile than most other room bookings and is likely to require additional Library resources due to the anticipated public interest,” Gentry said. Those resources could include extra security to insulate Cameron from protesters who may want to disrupt the event.

For public institutions, hosting controversial groups can be costly and sometimes dangerous. In one of the most famous examples, the public library in Wakefield, Massachusetts rented a meeting room to a neo-Nazi group in 2002. In an effort to prevent violence, the town shut down a highway, had staffers work at the library after hours, and paid hundreds of police officers to quell violence that erupted between neo-Nazis and anti-racist protesters.

Closer to home, the University of Washington provided access to Kane Hall, its largest auditorium, to far-right troll Milo Yiannopolous in 2017. Police in riot gear, hired to keep protesters away from the event, did not prevent two people from shooting a protester as Yiannopolous railed against ” hairy dykes,” “trannies,” and “Sasquatch lesbians” inside.

SPL’s policy on meeting rooms was tested most recently in 2020, when the library rented its main auditorium to a group of anti-trans activists engaged in legal efforts to bar trans women from gender-segregated spaces such as women’s restrooms. The library’s decision to provide space to the group sparked protests and a backlash against the library, including from trans and non-gender-conforming library staffers, who said the event was a threat to their safety and ability to do their jobs.

The event—held after hours with extra security, all funded by the public—sparked protests and caused long-term damage to the library’s reputation as a place that’s welcome to LGBTQ+ people, particularly trans and gender-nonconforming patrons and staff.

Drugs, Health

In Reversal, Library Will Allow Staff to Use Narcan on a Voluntary Basis

Diagram showing how to administer Narcan to an overdosing personBy Erica C. Barnett

In a sudden reversal of longstanding policy (and after three years of dogged coverage by PubliCola), the Seattle Public Library announced Wednesday that it will stock its 26 library branches with Narcan (naloxone), a nasal spray that can reverse opiate overdoses. Each branch will get one two-dose kit of Narcan, and the downtown branch will get one for each floor, with a few left over for later distribution, a library spokeswoman told PubliCola.

Library staff who want to administer Narcan if someone overdoses will be able to go through voluntary training in how to administer the drug. Untrained staffers won’t be allowed to give the drug, according to the library’s announcement, meaning that if someone overdoses at a library with no trained staff, “there is no guarantee that a patron who overdoses on Library grounds will receive naloxone.”

This policy contrasts with other Seattle departments. Frontline Seattle parks workers, such as lifeguards, parks concierges, and park rangers, all carry Narcan and can use it without special training. Other library systems also supply Narcan to workers and the public. In Chicago, for example, all library staff are trained to use Narcan and the library distributes kits for free to anyone who wants one.

The library spokeswoman said she could not provide any details about why the department changed its policy. A blog post announcing the change said only that “over the last few months,” the library went through “a careful review process, which included updated guidance on liability from the City Attorney’s Office and an examination of other City departments’ practices.” We have reached out to City Attorney Ann Davison’s office for more information on the change.

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In July, as we exclusively reported, a staffer asked if it would be okay for him to carry Narcan at work. At the time, the library said it had been advised by the city attorney’s office that employees who administered the drug would be unprotected by the both state’s Good Samaritan law, which protects people who voluntarily render emergency care, and a separate law protecting Washington residents from liability specifically for administering Narcan. Any library employee who used Narcan to try to reverse an overdose, a union representative told staffers in an email, could be subject to discipline.

A spokeswoman for the library said that the library is “requesting that staff not use their own supply of Narcan while at work during this interim period” before staffers have gone through training. “After staff volunteers are trained, we may revisit that.” The spokeswoman said the library is “in conversations about training with several organizations.”

Previously, the library had varying reasons for not stocking Narcan, which works by restoring breathing in an overdosing person. Back in 2020, a library spokeswoman told PubliCola that putting Narcan in libraries would require bargaining with the library union, for example.

People die of opiate overdoses when they stop breathing, and emergency responders often prefer to perform rescue breathing or provide oxygen to an overdosing person because naloxone can send people into rapid withdrawal, an extremely unpleasant side effect that, in practice, sometimes leads people to refuse additional care. Narcan, however, is extremely simple to administer—you squirt it into one nostril—and can save a person’s life during the period after they stop breathing but before medics arrive.

According to the King County Department of Public Health, there have been at least 42 likely overdoses in or outside public libraries in King County since 2019, including 16 inside library branches. Since 2017, at least eight people have died of drug-related causes at libraries in King County, half of them in Seattle.

Addiction, Drugs, Health, Schools

Amid Rising Fentanyl Deaths, Seattle Libraries Prohibit Overdose Reversal Drug
Public naloxone rescue kit in Boston, MA
Public naloxone rescue kit in Boston, MA

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle Public Library has advised library staff not to carry or use naloxone, the overdose-reversal drug sold under the brand name Narcan. As a matter of policy, the library does not stock Narcan or train workers to use it.

In an email to library staff last week, a representative from the union that represents most library employees, AFSCME 2083, wrote that “the City has been very clear that they believe Good Samaritan protections do not apply to public employees administering Narcan. In light of that liability concern, we have now been informed that any employees who administer Narcan on duty may be subject to discipline, unless they are explicitly directed to do so.”

“While these employer directives are in effect—in particular the new directive NOT to administer Narcan—Local 2083 cannot support member administration of Narcan on the job,” the email continued.

The union, which did not respond to a request for comment, sent the email to its members after an unidentified library staffer informed their boss that they were bringing Narcan to work. The drug, most commonly administered as a nasal spray, temporarily reverses the effects of an opiate overdose by blocking the effects of the opiate and causing an overdose victim to start breathing again.

“[The city attorney’s] legal guidance is that a staff member, who is in a paid capacity as Library employee, is likely not covered by the law and would subsequently expose themselves and the Library to liability for injury or death resulting from inappropriately administering Narcan.”—Seattle Public Library spokeswoman

Washington State’s original Good Samaritan law, adopted in 1975 and amended several times since, says that “Any person, including but not limited to a volunteer provider of emergency or medical services, who without compensation or the expectation of compensation renders emergency care at the scene of an emergency … shall not be liable for civil damages resulting from any act or omission in the rendering of such emergency care.”

A separate law adopted in 2015 created a “standing order” allowing “any person or entity” to obtain a prescription for opiate reversal medication, such as Narcan, and use it for overdose reversal without threat of criminal or civil liability for administering overdose-reversal drugs or for any outcome that happen as as result.

A spokeswoman for the Seattle Public Library, Elisa Murray, said the library asked the City Attorney’s Office if library workers would be protected by the Good Samaritan laws. “Their legal guidance is that a staff member, who is in a paid capacity as Library employee, is likely not covered by the law and would subsequently expose themselves and the Library to liability for injury or death resulting from inappropriately administering Narcan.” Murray said the initial advice came from former city attorney Pete Holmes’ office and was subsequently confirmed by the office of current City Attorney Ann Davison.

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“Bringing medicine to the workplace with the intent to administer it while working is outside of a staff member’s assigned work duties and against the Library’s direction related to Narcan,” Murray continued. The library has no plans to train staffers to use Narcan or stock the drug at library branches, “based on the Seattle Fire Department’s medical support expertise and response times.” In other words, it’s up to the Fire Department, which—like the police department—is facing staffing shortages, to respond to overdose calls on time.

The library gave a similar explanation for its decision not to stock naloxone back in 2020, when then-mayor Jenny Durkan handed out hundreds of naloxone kits to local businesses and schools in response to an uptick in overdoses from fentanyl, an opiate that is many times more potent than heroin. On Tuesday, the King County Council declared fentanyl a public health crisis. Last year, the county medical examiner confirmed that nearly 400 overdose deaths involved fentanyl; so far this year, the number of confirmed fentanyl deaths is 272. Overall, opiates have been implicated in nearly 450 deaths this year.

The Seattle Public School District stocks naloxone at every school and trains school nurses, security staff, and school administrators in how to administer the drug.

As public agencies go, SPL is in some ways an outlier. Staff at other public agencies in Seattle carry naloxone, as do other public libraries around the country, including Everett’s public library system.

For example, the Seattle Public School District stocks naloxone at every school, according to SPS prevention and intervention manager Lisa Davidson. The district also trains school nurses, security staff, and school administrators—along with anyone else who wants training—in overdose response. Most schools have multiple “designated trained responders,” according to Davidson, and district policy allows individual employees to get their own prescriptions for naloxone and use it as long as they’ve been trained to do so.

The school district’s policy also notes that under the state’s “standing order” law, “a person who possesses, stores, distributes, or administers an opioid overdose reversal medication is not subject to criminal or civil liability or disciplinary action if they acted in good faith and with reasonable care.”

The King County Library System’s naloxone policy, however, is similar to Seattle’s: “staff are not permitted to administer Narcan,” , KCLS spokeswoman Sarah Thomas said, and are supposed to call 911 if they see a patron in medical distress “KCLS does not have a policy on Narcan use,” Thomas said. Continue reading “Amid Rising Fentanyl Deaths, Seattle Libraries Prohibit Overdose Reversal Drug” →

Drugs, Elections, homelessness, Morning Crank, Taxes, Transportation

Seattle Shuffles Scooter Share Deck, Library Invests in Social Services, Campaign Forms to Fight Potential Cannabis Tax

1. Bird, a scooter provider that’s already ubiquitous in cities across the country, will soon enter the Seattle market, while Spin and the venture-backed sit-down scooter company Wheels will no longer be seen on Seattle streets. In addition to Bird, Link and Lime will continue as scooter providers in Seattle.

The Seattle Department of Transportation announced the scooter shuffle on its website last week, just weeks after publishing the results of a controversial, nonscientific survey concluding that more scooter riders are injured while riding than previously reported.

The city will also permanently permit a new bikesharing company, Veo, whose low-slung bikes have vestigial pedals but function more like a sit-down scooter, with a throttle that allows riders to propel them while using the pedals as footrests.

Seattle’s relationship with scooters (and bikesharing) has long been ambivalent. In 2020, two and a half years after banning scooters entirely, the city took a baby step forward by issuing permits to three companies for 500 scooters each. Since then, the city has expanded its scooter permits to allow each of three providers to put 2,000 scooters on the streets; Lime, which provides both e-assist bikes and scooters, has a fourth permit for a total of 2,000 bikes and scooters.

According to SDOT’s scoring matrix, Spin narrowly lost out to Bird, Link, and Lime after scoring slightly lower on two measures: Parking (which includes policies the company implemented to make sure people parked correctly and how it responded to improperly parked scooters) and “operations and equity,” which included a number of factors such as how the company responds to complaints and its efforts to place scooters in “equity areas” outside the center city, including southeast and far north Seattle.

According to the city’s scooter data dashboard, Wheels scored particularly poorly compared to other companies, including Spin, at providing equitable access to its scooters.

Veo, which operates like a scooter but is classified as a bicycle, poses what SDOT spokesman Ethan Bergerson calls “interesting questions” for the city. Unlike traditional scooters, Veo devices are legal on sidewalks; because they aren’t classified as scooters, they also occupy one of just three potential bikeshare permits, which could limit the number of shared e-bikes allowed on city streets in the future, if other companies decide they want to enter the Seattle market.

“The bike/scooter share landscape is very dynamic and has shifted considerably since the bike share program began in 2017,” Bergerson said, and now includes “more companies offering devices which combine some of the features of bikes and some of the features of scooters. … If this market trend continues, it may make sense to consider how to adjust our permits to reflect the changing technology and industry trends.”

2. The Seattle Public Library is ending its contract with the Downtown Emergency Service Center, which for more than five years has provided a part-time “community resource specialist” to connect patrons to food, social services, and shelter, and hiring its own social service specialists.

The new hires include an assistant managing librarian at the downtown branch to oversee the work; a new social services librarian who will “work with information staff to maintain current information and contacts, coordinate the Bus Ticket program, and act as a link between our regular information services and our Community Resource Specialists,” according to library spokeswoman Elisa Murray; and two new in-house community resource specialists, including one who will focus on outreach to youth and young people.

“While this new model doesn’t necessarily provide patrons more time with on-site staff, we do think we can maintain more partnerships with this model, which we hope will lead to increased opportunities for patrons to access the supportive services they need,” Murray said.

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For years, libraries (including Seattle’s) have debated whether, and to what extent, library staffers should be responsible for connecting patrons not just to library materials, but to social services and resources outside the library’s direct control. By hiring staff to oversee some of this work, SPL is making a more direct investment in the the theory that libraries can and should do both.

3. A new independent expenditure group representing marijuana retailers, called People for Legal Cannabis, just filed with the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission, reporting $16,000 in debt to the polling firm EMC Research. The group’s intent: To fight off potential legislation, first reported by David Hyde at KUOW, that would impose an additional sales tax on weed sales in Seattle. If the legislation, currently being floated by the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 3000, passes, the group could propose a referendum to overturn the law.

According to a presentation first posted on KUOW, which PubliCola obtained independently, the UFCW’s still-nascent proposal would impose a “cannabis equity tax” of 25 cents a gram on flower; $2.00 per half-gram of high-potency concentrates; and a penny per milligram of THC in everything else. The money would fund a paid “cannabis equity commission”; “workforce training” for cannabis workers; and a “cannabis equity fund” that would “prioritize the needs of those most impacted by the War on Drugs,” which locked up millions of Black and brown Americans for possessing and consuming weed. Continue reading “Seattle Shuffles Scooter Share Deck, Library Invests in Social Services, Campaign Forms to Fight Potential Cannabis Tax” →

City Council, homelessness, human services, legislature, Morning Fizz

DSHS Reopens In-Person Services; New Library Director Says Day Centers at Libraries Would Confuse Patrons

1. Proponents of a bill (HB 2075) that would force the state Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) to offer services in person scored a victory this week, as the agency agreed to reopen almost all its community services offices—key access points, prior to the pandemic, for people seeking services ranging from food stamps to cash assistance.

Since 2020, DSHS has required people seeking services to use an online portal or call a telephone hotline, where waits can be as long as several hours. The department opened the community service office lobbies late last year so that people seeking services could call the department on a land line or use a computer to access its online portal, but only agreed to offer services in person again after months of pressure from advocates for low-income and homeless people.

In a letter to stakeholders last week, DSHS Community Services Division director Babs Roberts wrote, “we have heard clearly from many of you and agree that some elements of our plans will not sufficiently meet the needs of all the people we serve, particularly those experiencing the deepest impacts of poverty and homelessness. Thus, we are making changes.”

However, Roberts added, short-staffing and social distancing requirements may result in “limited waiting space and possibly long wait times in our lobbies. This moment (like so many before) will require flexibility and patience.”

As PubliCola reported in January, the closure of in-person services made it essentially impossible for many of the state’s most vulnerable residents, including unsheltered people, to access critical services to which they are entitled, including food stamps, cash assistance, and housing subsidies.

Advocates are still pushing for the bill, which would direct DSHS to “strive to ensure” telephone wait times of no more than 30 minutes and would bar DSHS from restricting the kind of services clients can access in person. Friday is the cutoff date for the bill, which is currently in the senate rules committee, to pass out of the senate.

2. After a surprisingly contentious process, the Seattle Public Library Board unanimously appointed interim library director Tom Fay as the city’s Chief Librarian yesterday, rejecting another candidate, former Hennepin County (Minnesota) Library director Chad Helton, who resigned from his previous job amid criticism over his decision to work remotely from Los Angeles.

The vote, coming after a process that was mostly invisible to the public, shed little light on why the board chose Fay over Helton. (The two men were the only candidates that made it to the public stage of the vetting process.) During his one public interview, Helton defended his decision to run the Minnesota library system from California, saying he was just one of many people who started working from home during the pandemic. “The staff wasn’t really aware” that he lived elsewhere, Helton told the board, adding, “I didn’t think it was something that was necessary.” Fay lives in Pierce County.

As the (Minneapolis) Star-Tribune reported last week, Helton resigned from his position on February 1, after the Hennepin County Board of Supervisors passed a law, effective January 1, requiring the heads of public-facing departments like the library to live inside the state. Helton received $60,000 for “emotional damages,” plus $15,000 in attorneys’ fees, as part of a settlement.

Even if the city decided that library buildings would only open as day centers, without offering library services, Fay said, “if people were going in and out, that would be problematic for us, [because patrons] would have expectations of library services that would not be able to be offered.”

3. Hours after the vote, Fay gave a presentation on library operations to the Seattle City Council’s public assets and homelessness committee. Although the presentation was mostly a high-level look at how the library spends its money, Councilmember Lisa Herbold used the opportunity to ask Fay whether the library would consider allowing social-service providers to open and operate library branches as day centers during rare weather emergencies like last year’s Christmas snowstorm, when most library branches were closed.

“Does your plan [for emergency weather operations] consider the possibility of opening as a [day] shelter only, not using your staff, but using staff who are able to serve folks staying in a shelter, like we do [when] we open up City Hall as a shelter?” Herbold asked. Continue reading “DSHS Reopens In-Person Services; New Library Director Says Day Centers at Libraries Would Confuse Patrons” →