Garfield County commissioners (BOCC) stepped in last year to directly manage the county library board appointments - a decision that has stirred controversy. The change came on the heels of a subset of community members who object to library materials, such as certain Japanese Manga books, that they consider pornographic. Other community members are concerned that the library board will be stacked with conservative-leaning members, resulting in unwelcome changes in policy.
The BOCC appointed new library board members for the Rifle and Carbondale positions in January. On Thursday, Feb. 27, one man and three women applied for the Glenwood Springs seat, answering questions from the BOCC and members of the library district.
The candidates - Susan Use, Tony Hershey, Ksana Oglesby and Maureen Bierman - answered many of the same questions as last December when twice as many candidates were interviewed for the Glenwood seat. At the time, then-Commission Chair John Martin was on sick leave and Commissioners Tom Jankovsky and Mike Samson were making the appointments. They were split — Susan Use was Jankovsky’s choice but not Samson’s — and the process started over. Perry Will has since been elected to the county commission board so a split vote this time is not likely. (Martin retired at the end of 2024.)
Susan Use, back for a second interview, served as the Glenwood library trustee for four years until December. She said she would bring continuity to the board and wants to work with commissioners. “The law says [the BOCC] can reappoint board members. I understand that, but there needs to be a way that the commissioners actually know how well their board members are doing,” she said. “I keep going through scenarios in my head. I haven't quite decided how that can happen, but I know it needs to happen. There needs to be better communication with all of us.” She added, “We're all on the same page.”
Hershey is a longtime valley resident and works as a deputy District Attorney for the 9th Judicial District. He was back for a second interview and stated that children should not have access to adult material. “But how do you do that without impeding other people's rights to access the things that they want to?” he said. “And, you know, we have adult sections, we have library staff that can ensure that books for adults are seen only by adults and they're not in the children's area. If I had a five year old, I don't know that I would let him just go to the library by himself and wander around.”
He added, “It's also incumbent on parents and teachers, who take their kids to the library, to ensure the kid is not looking at things that [are] not appropriate.”
This was Ksana Oglesby’s first interview for the position. Oglesby is an accountant by trade and has been a member of the library district’s Citizens Oversight Committee since 2020. Here she tells the board why they should hire her. “I believe that my long years of being a library user as well as my financial background and my experience on the Citizens [Oversight Committee] as well as other boards throughout the community, make me a good candidate for this position,” she said. “And I'm not an attorney, I'm an accountant, so I don't really have a flowery speech to give.”
Thursday was also a second interview for Maureen Biermann, the Learning Commons Coordinator for Colorado Mountain College’s Quigley Library. She said she worked in Alaska for about 10 years and learned how to make decisions from the indigenous communities. “They really value consensus. And so in my work, consensus was kind of always behind every decision-making in a group setting. It was always something that was aimed for,” she explained. “And so, I kind of think about, when imagining what my role on this board would look like, it would be maybe at times a minority position, but always one in which I have to respect everybody's views on the board and which we aim towards consensus.” She added, “We can do that by, when we do have a disagreement or some sort of differing opinions, we can start to think about the broader context and where we can find common ground.”
The public meeting was peaceful, sparsely attended and brief, lasting about two hours. Jankovsky said that a decision will be announced at the regular commissioners meeting on March 10.
