Voters will select a new Community Library Network trustee while Post Falls waits for adults-only room to open

A former Post Falls School Board member and a former nonprofit communications director are running for an open seat on the Community Library Network Board of Trustees in North Idaho.

The five-member board oversees six library branches in Kootenai County outside Coeur d’Alene, as well as Pinehurst Library in Shoshone County. The open seat is left by Tony Ambrosetti who was appointed to fill a vacancy in November and did not file to run for a new term.

The May 20 election isn’t expected to affect the political dynamic of the majority of the board. Board members serve six-year terms. During the last few years, a conservative supermajority has rewritten much of the library’s policy, including a new adults-only room that will house mature content that staff deem harmful to minors.

The two candidates have different views about recent board actions.

Victoria Bauman, a mother of a 2-year-old daughter, is running to protect children from “harmful materials” according to her website.

Her opponent, Michelle Lippert, who served on the Post Falls School Board for 24 years and was a philosophy professor at North Idaho College, said the board’s behavior reminds her of the poor governance on the NIC board that nearly led to the school losing its accreditation.

“I know what a healthy board looks like,” Lippert said.

The NIC accreditation crisis happened under a previous board majority backed by the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee. The KCRCC endorsed every current member of the Community Library Network board, except for the departing Ambrosetti, who was appointed.

Trustee Vanessa Robinson, originally supported by the KCRCC when elected in 2021, has diverged from the rest of the board on various issues.

Bauman is endorsed by the KCRCC, board chair Rachelle Ottosen and the website CleanBooks4Kids – which has lobbied the library to remove or relocate a list of books it labeled obscene.

Bauman did not respond to requests for an interview. Her website says she moved to Idaho four years ago from California. She was the communications director for the nonprofit Constituting America, which promotes education about the U.S. Constitution, during the organization’s first year. She also worked as a fundraiser for Rudy Giuliani’s 2008 presidential campaign in California, according to her Constituting America bio.

Lippert, 71, was named Board Chair of the Year by the Idaho School Board Association in 2023. She is endorsed by the Library Alliance of North Idaho (formerly the Community Library Network Alliance), a group that is against censorship at the library. She ran unsuccessfully as a Democrat for the Idaho House in 2014.

Lippert said she is running to restore library services, parental rights and intellectual freedom.

She applied for the open board seat last year that went to Ambrosetti. She wasn’t surprised the board didn’t choose her, she said, but it was important to “keep them honest.”

Lippert said she believes she was the more qualified candidate, given her years on the Post Falls School Board.

Ambrosetti did not respond to an inquiry about why he decided not to run for another term, but he endorsed Bauman in an op-ed in the Coeur d’Alene Press responding to another op-ed by Lippert.

If Lippert is elected, she won’t be able to outvote the board, but she said it is still important to have a minority voice.

“I’m sure I wouldn’t get anywhere to be honest,” Lippert said. “But at least I could speak – force them to recognize what they are doing.”

Lippert compared the situation again to NIC, where a vocal minority faction on that board gained a foothold until last November, when they completed a sweep against the KCRCC-backed trustees.

“They had no power, but were constantly drawing attention to what was happening,” Lippert said.

Among her priorities, she wants to return to library hours and services that were cut last fall when the board laid off 13 part-time staff amid a budget deficit. That included closing the libraries on Sundays and reducing the acquisition budget for new books.

Lippert said the deficit was due to increasing the budget for legal fees to protect the board’s aggressive policies, which she said is “outrageous.”

While proponents frame their efforts to restrict children’s access to certain material as protecting parent’s rights, Lippert said the opposite is true. Parents have less freedom now than they did a few months ago when the board removed an option for an all-access children’s library card.

Previously, parents had three types of cards to choose from for their kids: access only to the children’s collection, access to the teen collection or open access to the entire library collection including materials from the regional interlibrary loan system, the Cooperative Library Network.

According to the library director’s January report, 8,906 child cards – more than 90% – had open access, while 813 chose one of the more restrictive options.

“I think parents are in the best position to know their children and responsibly monitor what their kids are reading,” Lippert said.

Bauman, board members and Library Director Martin Walters, all say the mature content policy is not censorship because adults still have access to the books.

But Lippert points out that the board in 2023 removed the phrase “intellectual freedom” from board policy and an entire section on the First Amendment.

“It seems what we have happening is an attempt to force a very narrow ideology on the entire community,” Lippert said.

Bauman says on her website that protecting children from harmful materials does not inherently violate free speech.

“Free speech, as enshrined in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, ensures the right to express ideas and information freely without undue governmental restriction,” Bauman wrote. “However, this right is not absolute and comes with certain limitations, particularly when it concerns the welfare and protection of minors.”

When Bauman announced her candidacy during public comment at the March board meeting, she said she is committed to upholding the Idaho Children’s School and Library Protection Act that was passed last year.

The new law requires libraries to relocate books that are “harmful to minors” to an area with adult access only, if a parent or guardian requests it.

“Harmful to minors” is defined as any work containing nudity, sexual conduct, sexual excitement or sado-masochistic abuse, that when “considered as a whole” lacks “serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value for minors.”

Lippert said she believes that law is unconstitutional, referring to a lawsuit by publishers challenging it in federal court.

“The law sees only two categories of humans: adults and minors,” Lippert said. “A book that is inappropriate for a 5-year-old is also inappropriate for a 17-year-old under this law. We can all agree that’s ridiculous.”

The library director has so far approved 16 books that were requested for relocation, but he is also reviewing an additional 140 titles that were not requested by any patron for possible inclusion in the adult-access only room.

Lippert said that if the library board applies its interpretation of “harmful to minors” evenly, it would have to include the vast majority of the regular adult collection, which would shrink the size of each branch library and would never fit in the small designated room at the Post Falls Library.