Who thinks kneecapping the East Baton Rouge Parish Library is a great idea?
In attacking the parish's most popular public institution, Mayor-President Sid Edwards commits a huge blunder
If Baton Rouge’s new mayor-president, Sid Edwards, had asked me about the ill-advised moves he should avoid making early in his term, I’m confident my list would have included, “Don’t pick a fight with the parish’s most popular public institution: the East Baton Rouge Parish Library.”
But that is precisely what Edwards did last week when he proposed to end the library system’s dedicated millage. This revenue source has given the once-beleaguered library the stability that’s helped it become Louisiana's best parish library system.
The library wants parish voters to renew its millage for another 10 years but at a reduced rate. Many people think this is sensible and helpful to Edwards.
But, in proposing his alternative plan, Edwards made several mistakes.
He unfairly attacked the library’s leadership, falsely accusing them of being irresponsible with the public’s money. It appears he did not do his homework and instead relied on incorrect information from someone who wishes to harm the library system.
Edwards compounded his error by proposing to end the library’s dedicated funding stream and placing it under his control.
To his credit, Edwards was relatively transparent about what would come next: He wants to divert funding from the library and use it for police pay raises.
Here’s how WBRZ-TV reported on the plan:
Baton Rouge Mayor-President Sid Edwards wants to cut taxes and give police a raise by taking money from the public library system.
Edwards said the library has a "budget surplus" from "years of overtaxation of citizens."
The city-parish 2025 budget indicates that the library system ended 2023 with a fund balance of just over $116 million. That year, the library took in more than $62 million and spent just over $56 million.
"I guess I could have chosen a lot of things, you know? I just looked at the surplus," Mayor-President Sid Edwards said.
The library responded to this attack on its credibility:
"People think that the money we have put aside in fund balance is a surplus, that is incorrect. The money we have put aside in surplus is next year's entire budget," [Mary Stein, the assistant director at the East Baton Rouge Parish Library] said. "It's the money we've collected over time to fund the Baker renovation, the Zachary renovation."
Stein said the library system has its own proposal it plans to present at Wednesday's Metro Council meeting. That proposal includes reducing the property tax from 11.1 to 10.5.
"I'm going to have to tell the people in Baker, Central, Zachary, Delmont, we can keep your branches open seven days a week, but you're not getting that new roof," Stein said.
Edwards’s attack on librarians brought hundreds of library supporters to the Metro Council meeting on Wednesday afternoon, me included. (One longtime Council member remarked that it was one of the largest crowds he’d ever seen at a Council meeting.)
The meeting ended in chaos, confusion, and some disappointment for those library supporters, as some council members were unwilling to reject Edwards’s proposal out of hand. That meant they were reluctant to approve the library’s millage proposal before considering Edwards’s plan.
I’m not sure who is advising some of these council members, but doing anything to plunge the East Baton Rouge Parish Library into the kind of destructive controversy that’s afflicted library systems in Lafayette, Livingston, and St. Tammany parishes would be a tragic and devastating mistake.
By pitting librarians against police officers, Edwards further compounded his blunder. That’s not only because he’s trying to undermine public support for the library system but also because, in doing so, he threatens to undermine support for the police.
Speaking of the police officers — who I believe deserve a pay raise — they did themselves no favors on Wednesday by showing up in force to the Council chambers and lining the room in an intimidating display of force. It was offensive and over the top, and it played into the hands of the library’s enemies.
And, trust me, the East Baton Rouge Parish Library has enemies.
If you wonder where Edwards got the crazy idea of trying to vilify the library, you should know that while he often sounds like a reasonable fellow who wants everyone to get along, he is surrounded by people on the political far-right. These extreme people read the Baton Rouge Advocate every morning to learn what’s going on and then read the far-right website The Hayride to know what to think.
And what does The Hayride think about the EBR Library and its millage proposal? Here’s what publisher Scott McKay wrote the other day:
This is an absolute classic case of what you get when you let privileged white leftists run things. They’ll waste money on superfluous things, like a library system which is essentially a jobs program for progressive cat-ladies and a petri dish for radical social experimentation, as we’ve seen time and again with all the LGBTQ propaganda (gay porn books, drag queen story hours) and other things libraries across the country have subjected the public to. Meanwhile, the effort to insure that the government has a proper monopoly on violence on the city’s streets goes unattended.
And when that monopoly is shattered, and society’s worst elements take to pillage and slaughter, what good are the libraries?
Not taking care of the basics of government is what causes urban ruin. But what the Left realized is that urban ruin actually works politically, because the more middle class voters you run off, the less of a risk you run of ever losing an election to a Republican.
Well, that project of weaponized governmental failure worked for a good long time in Baton Rouge. Until it didn’t. Eventually, Democrat base voters simply lose interest and decide they don’t really want to win anymore, and then a Republican does get elected.
It’s important, in such situations, to make it count. That’s what Edwards is trying to do.
And when [library assistant director] Mary Stein says they can’t fix the roof at the Baker library for $6 million, it’s a really good indication that nobody has to take her seriously. There is a Republican majority on the Metro Council. You’d think they’d give Edwards what he’s asking for.
This library hatred from The Hayride is not a one-off. Here’s what Hayride writer M. Fulton Robicheaux wrote in January about the library controversy in Livingston Parish:
Certain people in Livingston Parish who have championed the leftist view in the libraries have also become quite famous over this battle. They have been interviewed, and gotten book and movie deals out of this. Oprah talks about their “brave” fight. The national media has been fawning all over them. They have an endless stream of money donated to them to fund as many failed lawsuits and appeals as their heart’s desire. It appears that almost all this money is coming from out of state.
The sad truth is that the left has a well-funded machine in place to fight these types of reforms in the library. There is money pouring in from all over the country to push how-to sex manuals and novels with graphic sexual content for children in the public library. Of course, this is also a scene that has played out across the country. Parents are waking up to the fact that these books have been made available to their children, and they are not happy. And they protest. And are usually ignored by the powers that be, as the Livingston library board ignored parents for so long. They eventually get thrown out by the voters, which ignites a bonfire on the left and they go on the attack with falsehoods, untruths and propaganda to confuse and misinform the conservative residents of Livingston Parish (or any other place).
I don’t know if Edward reads The Hayride, but I can promise that some of his aides and informal advisors do.
Edwards presents himself as an honest man who wants to find a way to give police officers a pay raise. But by pitting libraries against police officers, he threatens to drag the East Baton Rouge Library system into a partisan, hyper-politicized mud-wrestling contest that will not end well for either side. (I’m disappointed that the Baton Rouge Police Department doesn’t seem to recognize this obvious fact.)
Do the citizens of Baton Rouge want their parish to be consumed by the ugly, destructive culture-war battles we’ve seen in Livingston, Lafayette, or St. Tammany?
I’m confident that most voters find that prospect repulsive. They trust their library because they know it well — and it serves them well.
If Edwards and council members don’t wake up to see the sleeping bear they’ve poked with their attacks on the library (again, it is, by far, the most respected public institution in the parish), they might one day find that angry, very hungry bear pounding on their proverbial front doors.
Now I understand why there were dozens of police cruisers parked willy nilly around downtown yesterday. I assumed it was a training or certification day. Discovering it was a show of police political force is extremely discomforting amid the current national and state government stampedes toward authoritarianism.
When our voters approved a new West Feliciana Parish Library a little over a decade ago, many of the same arguments detractors in EBR were made, but not with as much vitriol and without pitting one agency directly against another. Our library has become the jewel of our community providing WiFi for people without Internet service, reading enrichment for our children, modern classroom space for our LSU OLLI classes, space for many public meetings, etc. Even the person elected parish president back then opposed the new library, but became a big supporter once it opened. Libraries are no longer simply book depositories. They are invaluable resources to the public availing themselves to them.