‘Be Beige, Not Rainbow’

This spring, Timberland Regional Library asked its patrons what they thought of it. Nearly 1,600 answered, and nine in ten were satisfied. Handed an open field to name any concern, most who used it either praised the staff or asked for more: more books and shorter holds, longer hours, better-kept buildings, the library kept open, staffed, and funded. More of the library, not less of it.

The survey did not ask about books, or displays, or what the library should be. It was a voluntary satisfaction questionnaire, open to anyone online and not a scientific poll, fielded as a $3.8 million budget crisis closed in around the district. Nearly two in three respondents added a written comment of their own.

A few weeks later, the board’s president, Brian Mittge, brought the library’s interim director a list of his own: notes, he says, for a conversation, “distilled from … conversations with many people across our five-county region.” Headed “desired outcomes,” it called for materials “about sex, sexual & gender orientation” to be moved out of the children’s and youth sections, for an end to “rainbow and activist displays,” for the libraries to “be beige, not rainbow.” Within days it was posted inside a TRL staff building, photographed, and shared online.

The document offers no survey or count of its own. The library has one, taken weeks earlier. A review of all 1,581 responses found three that clearly asked for anything like what the document proposes, and a fourth that could be read that way; one wanted the children’s section to carry “less lgbtq centered books.” A few others were vaguer still, objecting that some books were “nasty” or too “politically correct,” without naming the children’s section or a display. What its patrons asked for ran the other way: more of the library, not less; where they mentioned the collection at all, more books, not fewer.

Mittge questions what the survey can show. Those who answer it, he said, are “nearly all active library users,” while the patrons he hears from, “unwilling to accept the activism” on the shelves, have “given up on the library” and were “not likely to encounter or take the survey.” The objection names a real limit of any voluntary survey, and an unprovable one: the population he describes is asserted, not counted.

The document

The list Mittge brought to that meeting runs to nine points, photographed inside the service center and later published by the Chronicle:

Mittge casts the list as the continuation of work he began in 2024. When the board revised the district’s mission and vision statements, he proposed a library that would be a “place of respite” where patrons could “safely tap into the wisdom of the ages in politically neutral spaces.” The board declined to adopt it. The “desired outcomes,” he told the Chronicle, were the context he carried into his June meeting with the interim director: “common-sense steps we can take to de-politicize our libraries to make them safer and more welcoming for all children and families.”

“Most people would agree that we should never sexualize children — that we should protect them and parents,” he said. “That’s what I’m aiming for in these desired outcomes, which come directly from people in our communities who are asking for changes at TRL.”

Mittge has described the list as notes for a conversation rather than a proposal he has put to the board, and as of publication no board action on it had been reported.

The law draws the same line. Hugh Spitzer, a retired University of Washington law professor who taught local government law, said a Washington library district’s powers are “exercised by their boards,” and that an individual trustee, even the president, is “just one vote.” A president’s memo of ideas, he said, “is just a memo.”

The list returns, again and again, to one word. The library should be “neutral”: “nonpartisan,” a place of “unity, not division,” “not hotbeds of activism.” “Neutral” is the word Mittge reaches for most. It is also a word he has used, three years running, in a campaign of his own.

Whose neutrality

Mittge is entitled to his beliefs, and to publish them. For three years running, he has used his column in the Chronicle, the Lewis County paper where he has written for more than a decade, to promote Fidelity Month, a national religious observance whose participants recommit each year to “fidelity to God, our spouses and families, our communities, and country.” He is the sole administrator of a Facebook group, “Lewis County WA Fidelity Month,” for a county-wide observance of it. None of that is the library’s business, and none of it disqualifies him from its board.

What he asks of the library is another matter. The “desired outcomes” would clear its shelves of “rainbow and activist displays” (the Pride displays that recognize the library’s LGBTQ patrons) in the name of a library that is “neutral,” “nonpartisan,” a place of “unity, not division.” He uses that language elsewhere too: in his Fidelity Month columns, his goal for the month is to “heal division and restore unity.” But a library cleared of Pride is not neutral ground. Recognizing its LGBTQ patrons was never a side to take; treating it as one is the side Mittge takes in his own public life.

That difficulty is one of conduct, not creed. A library trustee may believe whatever he likes; the First Amendment protects his columns exactly as it protects the shelves he would rearrange. But under the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights, which TRL’s own board has adopted, the office he holds carries the opposite obligation: to defend the freedom to read, not to narrow it.

What it would do

The library, the document says, should be “for families, not activists and homeless,” setting people without housing, whom public libraries are built to serve, outside the patrons it would welcome. But the group named or implied in nearly every other line is LGBTQ people, and the clearest account of what the document would do to them has come from inside the board itself.

Dustin Loup, the Grays Harbor trustee who confirmed the list came from Mittge, is the board’s vice-chair and is in line to succeed Mittge as president next year. “The existence of LGBTQIA+ people should never be conflated with ‘sexuality,’” Loup told The Daily World. A book about a family of penguins, he said, “isn’t sexual content. It’s a book about a family.” To move such books out of the children’s section, as the document directs, is to place some families behind an age line. What Loup says he wants instead is “a library where my own kids, and every kid, can find books that represent their family, including queer families like mine, visibly on the shelf.”

“A book about a family of penguins… isn’t sexual content. It’s a book about a family.” Dustin Loup, Timberland Regional Library trustee

Asked whether any of it had been carried out, Loup said none of it had. The document “has never been placed on a board agenda,” he said, and he had “not been made aware of any account of these outcomes being presented to staff as a directive.” He and Mittge “disagree, clearly and on the record,” he added, but “still share an important job to stabilize our five county library district.”

Loup is not the only one inside the board. Mary Beth Harrington, the Thurston County trustee who chairs the budget committee and presents nationally on library-board governance, calls Mittge’s list “the definition of censorship,” a charge he rejects, and says she opposes “every item” on it. She points to the commitments the board has adopted, to intellectual freedom and the freedom to read. The document, she said, never went to the board or its policy committee; Mittge had raised the ideas with her at a lunch months earlier, where, she said, “it was clear … that we did not see eye to eye.”

A third trustee, Toni Gwin of Pacific County, took the same position: “I do not support Brian’s proposal.” That puts three of the board’s five seated trustees, Loup, Harrington, and Gwin, on record against the document. Mittge defends it. The fifth, Hal Blanton, Lewis County’s longest-serving trustee, took neither side: asked for comment, he described the list the way Mittge does, as “conversation points” and “not an official document, nor has it been discussed at a board meeting,” but he did not defend its substance or say whether he supports it. Asked whether decisions about shelving and displays belong with the professional librarians, the board, or the president, he chose none of the three: they should be “a shared dialogue,” he said, with the public given “an opportunity to help guide decisions.” The board has taken no vote on the document; two of its seven seats sit empty, and a majority of the five now filled are already against it.

The workers who staff the libraries said as much. Brent Caron, president of AFSCME Local 3758, which by its own account represents most of TRL’s employees, called Mittge’s stance “abhorrent to library values.” On June 17, the local issued a statement denouncing the “desired outcomes” by name and the “harmful views it expresses,” and saying it opposes “any proposals that would restrict or remove access to books and materials based on the identities they represent.”

The library’s administration weighed in too. On June 19, the interim director, Andrea Heisel, published “A Response to Trustee Mittge’s Desired Outcomes Document.” The library “will always be a place for our LGBTQIA+ and unhoused community members,” she wrote, answering the document’s call for a library “for families, not activists and homeless”; it would “continue to provide age-appropriate resources for all.” Where the document calls for a library “of respite, not hotbeds of activism,” she wrote that libraries are “literal lifesaving places of respite.” Where it asks for “unity, not division,” she answered: “Where Trustee Mittge sees division, I see the opportunity … to create unity in our shared humanity.” Limiting or segregating resources for LGBTQ patrons, she added, “actively increases adverse life outcomes and harms them.”

Researchers who study LGBTQ youth associate more supportive environments with lower rates of attempted suicide. A rainbow display is one way a library signals it is such a place; the document’s instruction to “be beige, not rainbow” is an instruction to take that signal down.

The law, and the profession

The document’s central instruction is to move materials “about sex, sexual & gender orientation” out of the children’s and youth sections. It has been tried before, and tested in court. In Sund v. City of Wichita Falls, a 2000 federal case in Texas, the city council passed a resolution letting 300 library-card holders petition to move two picture books about children with same-sex parents, Heather Has Two Mommies and Daddy’s Roommate, out of the children’s section and into the adult stacks, books about families much like the one Loup describes. A federal court enjoined it: even moving a book, it held, rather than removing it, can unconstitutionally burden the right to receive information. That ruling is persuasive in Washington but binds no court there.

Mittge distinguishes that case. The Wichita Falls plan, he wrote, “mandated that movement based on community petition,” whereas he asks only that the district’s own staff “look at our children’s section in a different way.” The petition was indeed part of what the court condemned. But one of its grounds did not depend on the petition: the court rejected the city’s argument that moving a book rather than removing it left the Constitution untouched, finding that forcing the books out placed “a significant burden” on readers’ access. And a more recent case tested the staff-driven version Mittge describes.

After the Crawford County library system in Arkansas pulled LGBTQ-themed children’s books from its children’s section, labeled them, and moved them to a separate “social section,” a federal judge in 2024 granted summary judgment and permanently enjoined the move as unconstitutional, writing that “it is one thing to restrict minors’ access to sexually explicit material, but a very different thing to restrict minors’ access to unpopular opinions.” The library system, not a citizen petition, had ordered the move; what made it unlawful, the court found, was the evidence that it was meant to single out a disfavored viewpoint. The county did not appeal. The ruling binds no court in Washington, but it struck down a closely similar move.

One recent decision has cut the other way, from the Fifth Circuit, which covers Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Sitting en banc in 2025, it ruled, 10 to 7, that library patrons have no First Amendment right to receive information they can use to challenge a library’s decisions about which books to acquire, keep, or remove; seven of those ten judges went further and called those collection decisions “government speech.” The Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal in December 2025, letting the ruling stand as the law in those three states. Washington sits in the Ninth. That ruling does not apply here.

The profession is less divided than the courts. The American Library Association, whose Library Bill of Rights TRL’s board has formally adopted, treats relocating or labeling materials because of their subject matter as a form of censorship, and restricting access by age as a violation of a reader’s rights. TRL has written that principle into its own rules. Its Collection Guidelines, set by the librarians who manage the collection and in place since 2022, provide that “there shall be no prejudicial labeling, sequestering, or alteration of materials because of controversy surrounding the author or the subject matter,” and they leave the selection of materials to the executive director and the library’s professional staff; nothing in them gives an individual trustee, or the board president acting alone, authority to direct where a book is shelved. A sitting trustee locates that authority in the same place: those decisions, Gwin said, rest with “the librarians and library staff,” who “possess the knowledge and expertise needed to make informed decisions.”

Mittge says that sorting could be left to the district’s own staff, who are “well-trained”: “It wouldn’t be hard to tell which books are of concern.” But identifying the books of concern by subject and setting them apart is the labeling and sequestering the policy bars. Staff doing the sorting does not make it any less sorting.

What the policy does provide for is a collection in “a variety of formats and comprehension levels,” the ordinary work of matching a book to its intended audience. That is what age-appropriate placement means, and what keeps genuinely explicit material out of the children’s section. The document asks for something else under the same name: it sorts materials by their subject, which Mittge calls age-appropriate placement.

Asked whether any of this was being carried out, the administration said it was not. No materials are being relocated, reshelved, or restricted on these subjects, the interim director, Andrea Heisel, wrote in answers for this article; to do so would run “in direct contradiction” to the library’s board-adopted policies, among them the Library Bill of Rights and the freedom-to-read and freedom-to-view statements. The document itself has no standing: “there is no status on this document at this time,” she wrote, because any change to library policy requires “a vote of the Board.”

Keyth Sokol, who chairs the Washington Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Section and spoke in his individual capacity, not for the association, said the distinction that matters is between organizing a collection and policing it: there is a difference, he said, “between labeling in order to catalog… as opposed to labeling them to segregate them and isolate them.” Librarians “are not gatekeepers,” he added, and “do not serve in loco parentis”; they do not stand in a parent’s place.

Heisel named what a parent can do, and where it stops. Library staff “do not operate in the place of parents,” she wrote; the library relies on them to guide a child’s use of it, “whether that means reviewing themselves what their children want to check out, consulting with librarians on finding appropriate books, or deciding whether to participate or not in programs.” Parents “have the right to guide their children’s reading,” she added, “but not to make decisions for other parents’ children.”

“Parents have the right to guide their children’s reading but not to make decisions for other parents’ children.” Andrea Heisel, Timberland Regional Library interim director

The case for sorting by subject is usually made in the name of protecting children, a wish few would call anything but sincere, and one trustee has voiced a version of it on the record, on his own initiative, before the document existed. In December, prompted by a constituent’s email about children’s books, Hal Blanton, the Lewis County trustee, asked the board to take up the question. “We have a shared responsibility to work in safety for children,” he told it, and asked it to weigh “how kids are exposed to things and what we have a responsibility to keep them from being exposed to,” pointing to the lines society already draws by age: the rules for employing minors, the cigarette ads once “aimed at kids,” the lawsuits over children on social media. Six months later, asked about the document for this article, he returned to it: there can be “guardrails installed to ensure that material can be sorted in a manner that can shield children from content that their parents wouldn’t want them exposed to without parental involvement.” Asked specifically whether that reaches a picture book about a same-sex family, the example Loup raises, he kept to the general argument, that some material can be sorted so children are not “exposed to” what their parents have not cleared.

Those lines are all drawn by age, not by subject, and each works by informing a parent or drawing one line for everyone, while the film still plays and the book stays on the shelf. The document asks for the opposite: not to inform a family but to move its subject out of the section altogether.

Some library systems do install the kind of guardrail Blanton describes, capping a child’s card to the children’s room or to a reading level. But such a card sorts by where a book sits, not by what it is about: it can say “children’s collection only,” never “nothing about gender.” To keep books “about sex, sexual & gender orientation” from one family’s child, the library would first have to set those titles apart in a category of their own, the labeling its policy forbids; and a category set apart for one child is set apart for all, moving the books for every family, including the ones who want their children to find them.

Another of the document’s directives names one line in particular. It asks for “no dividing kids from parents, no suggesting they hide things from them,” which Mittge says refers to a sentence on the library’s flyer of resources for LGBTQ children and families: “No matter your age, you have the right to keep your library account private. Check with library staff anytime with questions about your account.” Parents, he wrote, “have reasonably interpreted” that as “assuring children that they can hide things from their parents.” Read literally, the line says what Mittge says it says: a child’s library record is private, the parent included. That is not the flyer improvising. It is what library confidentiality means, and TRL is bound to it: Washington’s public-records act, RCW 42.56.310, shields a patron’s library records from disclosure, and TRL’s own board-adopted policy goes further, applying that confidentiality directly to parents, stating that the library “does not disclose information to the parent or guardian regarding the minor’s library record.” The flyer states a rule the library already follows, on a page written for the LGBTQ kids most likely to need it: a child can look for a book about their own life without having it reported home against their wishes.

That wording is now gone. It was changed this spring after a post on a Lewis County community Facebook page singled out the pamphlet’s language, the interim director, Andrea Heisel, said; staff revised it on their own, and no one directed them. They did not know Mittge would raise the pamphlet at the June 12 meeting he had asked her for; he points to the change anyway as proof that “common-sense changes are possible.” The confidentiality itself, Heisel said, remains the library’s policy, a minor’s account private unless the patron agrees to share it, reviewed when a family signs up. What was removed was the flyer’s plain statement of it, on the flyer those readers were most likely to see.

The flyer also answers the document’s first demand before it is made. It points young readers to the library’s juvenile call numbers, J 306.76 for sexuality and gender, J 612.66 for body and puberty, and to dozens of titles shelved in the juvenile collection. Placing that material there is the judgment of the staff who built the collection, the same judgment the document’s opening line would reverse: it asks that “materials about sex, sexual & gender orientation” be “moved from children & youth sections to adult section.”

None of this is cost-free. Where officials have forced the issue, the bill has come due, often through the librarians caught in the middle. In Campbell County, Wyoming, a librarian fired after she refused to relocate LGBTQ titles sued for retaliation and settled for $700,000; in Llano County, Texas, a fired librarian settled a similar claim for $225,000. Those were suits by employees pushed out, not patrons; a relocation order that staff refuse to carry out is how a board backs into that kind of bill. The relocation itself carries a separate risk, in a court where the nearest ruling has gone against such plans. Either way, it is a fight a district this deep in deficit can ill afford.

A national pattern

Mittge says the “desired outcomes” come “directly from people in our communities.” The national record of how book disputes begin tells a different story. In 2024, according to the American Library Association, 72 percent of demands to remove material from public and school libraries came from pressure groups and government officials (board members, elected officeholders, organized campaigns), and 16 percent from parents. A 2023 Washington Post analysis of more than 1,000 book challenges from the 2021–2022 school year found that a majority were filed by just eleven people. Where the demand to remove books arises, it tends to come not from the broad public but from a small number of officials and organized groups.

The pattern has reached Washington. Columbia County is a small rural district whose trustees, like TRL’s, are seated by county commissioners. There, a fight that began over a single transgender resource escalated until residents moved to dissolve the library outright. A court stopped them. The push came from officials and organized groups, not a groundswell of patrons.

The pattern reached TRL itself in 2023: when a campaign pressed the library to adopt a film-style book-rating system, the library’s director of content and access at the time, Andrea Heisel, wrote that the coordinated groups behind such proposals “are purposefully stigmatizing works that address the lives and experiences of people outside of areas considered ‘appropriate.’”

Where the public has been asked about removing books, it has been wary: a 2023 NPR/Ipsos poll found majorities opposed to banning and pulling books from libraries and classrooms, including a slim majority of Republicans. A separate Ipsos survey found most voters, Republicans among them, less likely to back a candidate who supports book bans. The “desired outcomes” stop short of removal; they would relocate, and on that the public is more forgiving: most Americans, polling suggests, accept genuine age-appropriateness as a reason to shelve a book differently.

But genuine age-grading, in Sokol’s account, exists to help readers find what is meant for them, not to keep them from it: shelve the picture books in the adult nonfiction and their circulation drops, while the children who want them no longer know they exist. To Sokol, moving a book rather than removing it is no defense. Speaking for himself, not the association, and answering an argument he says he has heard for years rather than describing anyone at TRL, he took up the claim that relocating material is not censorship so long as nothing is taken off the shelves entirely. People who make that argument, he said, insist they are not censoring because “they just want them moved out of view.” His answer: “This is like saying you’re ok with homosexuality as long as you don’t have to see it.”

Some sorting by age is uncontroversial: few would object to keeping sexually explicit material out of the picture-book section, whatever its subject. The document asks for something more. It does not turn on whether a book is explicit; it turns on a subject, “sex, sexual & gender orientation,” written broadly enough to reach a book that only depicts a same-sex family, with nothing sexual in it, the kind Loup described from inside the board. The subject it names is itself an identity: a book that only shows a same-sex family is treated as being about sexual orientation, while an otherwise identical book about a mother and father is simply a book about a family. Mittge was asked exactly this: whether a picture book about a child with two mothers would be treated as “about sexual orientation” when one about a mother and father would not. He did not say it would not. He recast the target as material about “human sexuality” and “sexual identity,” and “gender fluidity,” leaving the asymmetry unanswered. Moving the first and not the second is not age-grading; it is the same sorting instinct that, elsewhere in the document, would keep the library “for families, not activists and homeless”: people classed by who they are, not books shelved by whom they are for. That is the subject-based restriction the profession treats as censorship, whether a book is moved or pulled.

The stakes

All of this is unfolding while the library fights for its survival. In February, TRL announced a $3.8 million structural deficit and cut roughly 40 percent of its public-facing staff. Its executive director, Cheryl Heywood, who in 2023 had refused the same push to rate the collection, resigned this spring, with no permanent successor yet named. The district is now run by an interim director, Andrea Heisel, the official Mittge brought his list to.

By Heisel’s account, Mittge did not bring the list to her as a demand. He presented it as “a discussion” and as “what he believed could be a compromise and one of the ways in which he felt he could support a levy lid lift resolution,” she wrote. He also “understood,” she wrote, “that he is only one Board member out of the five.” Mittge, asked about her account, did not dispute it; the notes, he wrote, were “a good-faith effort to find common ground.”

The deficit’s roots are structural; Mittge did not create them. But the board holds fiduciary responsibility for the library’s finances, and Mittge shares it: in December he joined the other seated trustees in unanimously adopting the budget that produced it, the fourth consecutive deficit budget the district had passed.

The deeper problem is revenue. Under Washington’s 1 percent cap on property-tax growth, TRL’s levy rate has eroded by nearly half since 2014, and the district has not asked voters for a lid lift since 2009. A lid lift is the only tool that can reset the rate, and every comparable system in the state has used one, as this reporter’s review of TRL’s budgets documented this spring. It passes on a simple majority of the combined five-county vote, where the population center, urban Thurston, subsidizes the rural counties that lean on its tax base. But the levy funds one system, not five. A voter who would deny the rural counties their subsidy would be denying it to Olympia and Lacey too: when the money falls short, the branches that close are in every county.

The document has done something else as well. On June 17, as it drew wider attention, Lewis County Commissioner Sean Swope published a commentary, “I stand firmly with Brian Mittge.” In it, Swope writes that he “do[es] not support banning books” and that “every book has its proper place,” but that “sexually explicit content, books on gender and sexual orientation, and pornographic illustrated material do not belong in the children’s section,” and should move “to the adult areas where they belong.” That is the document’s central proposal, now in a commissioner’s own words. Then the condition: “If the board and library leadership refuse to change course,” he wrote, “I will fight hard against any levy lid lift,” and will “look at every option to stop forcing Lewis County taxpayers to fund a system that no longer serves its original purpose.” He calls it stewardship: books “for everyone,” a library “beige, not rainbow,” free of “ideological displays and monthly celebrations” he says “divide us at taxpayer expense.”

Swope’s quarrel with the library predates this document. In June 2023, he posted a photo of the same flyer of resources for LGBTQ youth, the one carrying the privacy line the document now targets, and wrote, “This is grooming behavior.” That word is Swope’s; the document does not use it, and Mittge has not. A fellow Lewis County commissioner, Lindsey Pollock, who had called the use of “groomers” “a very inappropriate, derogatory line of thinking,” said Swope was “not saying it on behalf of the commission.” That fall, after library workers were accused of “grooming” at a county commissioners’ meeting, their union condemned the rhetoric, quoting the Anti-Defamation League’s finding that “the use of the word grooming in this context is a dangerous and harmful lie.” No rating policy followed. He returned to it in his op-ed, writing that libraries should not be “spots to divide children from their parents.”

The condition he sets is not a dollar figure or a level of service, but whether the library moves those materials out of the children’s and youth sections and ends the displays. That, by his own statement, is the condition he places on his support for the library’s public funding. Swope’s posture is sharper than Mittge’s own: where Swope has made the changes a public condition of his support, Mittge, by Heisel’s account, raised them privately, as a compromise he believed might bring him to back the levy.

Swope is one of several county officials whose voters fund the library, and they do not all agree. Tye Menser, a Thurston County commissioner, said he does not support the changes the document proposes and wants the library’s funding kept out of the fight: “I do not think it is appropriate to intertwine policy issues like this one with the issue of a stable funding base for TRL.”

At a June 23 work session, another Thurston County commissioner, Emily Clouse, circulated a draft condemning the “desired outcomes” by name. The next day, the Thurston commissioners reworked it from a letter directing the district’s other four counties into a statement of their own board’s position and adopted it, to carry all five commissioners’ signatures, ahead of that evening’s library board meeting. It condemns the document “in the clearest possible terms,” says the library’s board should reaffirm the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights, which the district has adopted, as binding policy, and affirms that the library “exists to serve all members of our communities without exception.”

The commissioners’ role does not end at the levy. TRL’s trustees are not elected; under state law, each is nominated by a home county and then seated only by the joint action of all five counties’ commissioners, the same officials now divided over the document and over the money. The board has seven seats; two sit empty, snagged in a standoff between two of the counties, and the rest come open as terms run out. The majority that leans against the document is the board as it stands today, not a verdict. What it becomes is a matter of county politics: the politics now playing out over the levy. The commissioners who fill those seats, and who will decide whether to back the levy, are themselves on the ballot, answerable to the voters of each county.

Not every trustee accepts how Swope frames his threat. Harrington, who chairs the board’s budget committee, called it “appalling that he would choose to bankrupt the entire five-county library system and destroy rural branches over his personal anti-LGBTQ+ crusade.” Swope, in his commentary, casts his own aim not as animus but as common sense and the protection of children and taxpayers.

Whether that helps the library or costs it the votes it needs is, for now, an open question. Swope and Harrington disagree. A levy lid lift must carry the combined vote of all five counties, the urban and the rural together. Swope expects the fight to drive voters away. Harrington expects it to bring them out: the controversy, she said, “may help persuade voters to approve a levy lid lift” by reminding them what it pays for, the library’s “current services.” Book bans poll badly across party lines, as those surveys show, and Mittge will answer that his plan is age-appropriate shelving, not a ban. What is not in dispute is that a library deep in deficit must now ask five counties for money in the middle of a fight over what it may shelve. Asked whether he welcomed what Swope had done with the document or would refuse it, Mittge did neither. “The commissioner’s commentary speaks for itself,” he wrote, adding that he had not said he would oppose the lid lift. He neither embraced the commissioner’s threat nor disavowed it.

Mittge responds

Mittge answered at length. Reached before the deadline, he responded on the record, in writing, to each of the questions put to him.

He cast the document as something smaller than a program. The nine points were “my own notes” for a meeting he had sought with the interim director, carried in to “make sure I covered these points in the conversation” and left with her “as a courtesy”; staff at the service center, he said, “saw, photographed and shared these notes publicly.” He had not brought them to the board, and no commissioner had asked him to develop them: to whether any official had directed the effort he answered “No,” and to whether he meant to make the list policy or had told staff to act on it, “No and no.” But he did not disown the contents. “I stand behind what I wrote,” he wrote, “but they were not written in a fully fleshed-out form.”

What he wants, he wrote, is “common-sense” change “within current policies” that “would not remove any books” and “would censor nothing,” only “move books on sex, sexuality and gender fluidity out of areas where kids would stumble across them” without “parents first being aware.”

On the displays, he offered a principle as well as a remedy. The library should be “fully comfortable with patriotic displays,” he wrote, but should not “take the side of any political party or cause”; a display pushing “strongly in one direction” on a “divisive” issue would “alienate half of our population.” That treats a Pride display as one side of a contested issue, the premise the library’s trustees and its director reject. His remedy was narrower than the document’s flat “no rainbow and activist displays”: a local option, in which “individual libraries” could “be given a choice on what to celebrate each month,” so “many people in the Olympia community might love having a Pride display in June” while “other smaller communities might better appreciate a different celebration.” The phrase “be beige, not rainbow,” he said, was not originally his but came from a “community leader”; he included it in his notes. But a choice made library by library is one some libraries will make against it: the rural child looking for a sign the library is a place for them loses it in the counties where a branch decides so, even as Olympia keeps it.

He rejected the word for all of it. “I don’t see this as censorship at all,” he wrote. “Nothing is removed from the library.” He confirmed the lunch with Harrington and that the two “did not see eye to eye.” And he returned, more than once, to the levy the library’s survival depends on. He could not “ask people to increase their taxes,” he wrote, while they believe the system “is actively opposed to their values.” “I want,” he wrote, “to get to yes on the levy lid lift.”

The board meets on the evening of June 24, in Ocean Park, at the western edge of the district. The “desired outcomes” are not on the agenda; by Mittge’s account they were never meant as policy, only notes. The board’s business that night runs to the library’s survival: furloughs for non-represented staff, the levy lid lift, the upkeep of its branches. But the questions the document raises do not depend on the agenda. A Lewis County commissioner has already made its changes a condition of his support for the library’s funding, and Mittge, asked, said he stands behind what he wrote.

Set aside the vocabulary of neutrality, and the document asks for something concrete: that a public library serving five counties be narrowed, some of its books moved out of the children’s section, its displays cleared, its welcome withdrawn from some of the people who use it — the families it would shelve behind an age line, and the patrons without homes for whom a public library is one of the last free, warm rooms left. The library’s own patrons, handed an open field, asked for almost none of it. The board president’s own columns show whose “neutrality” is on offer. A court elsewhere, though it binds no judge here, blocked a plan to do the very thing this one asks: move such books out of the children’s section. And the professional standard the board itself adopted asks its trustees to widen access, not narrow it.

The question the document frames best is its own. “You’re alienating people,” it reads. “They’re saying no.” But the child in Centralia or Aberdeen who comes in looking for a book about a family like their own, and is sent to the adult section to find it, is not one of the people saying no. And when the library asked its own patrons this spring what they wanted, nearly 1,600 answered. Three asked for anything close, a fourth arguably. The rest, when they asked for anything, asked for more of the library, not less of it.