Mason Apperson is 23 years old. He grew up near Climax Springs, a small town in Missouri’s Camden County. His grandmother, Carollee Apperson, retired after serving as the town’s librarian for three decades.
“I really believe it helped raise my literacy level at an early age," he says, "earlier that I believe I would have without the library itself.”
Kathy Bolch is originally from New England, but these days, describes herself as a proud Missouri farmer.
“It’s important for the children," she says of her local library. "It’s important for the seniors, it’s important for the adults. We use internet access because a lot of people in Stoutland don’t have the internet. The community watch meets there. It’s just a general all-around area for just a gathering of the local people.”
She says she got her Stoutland Library card roughly 13 years ago, right after moving to the area.
Apperson and Bolch both say they were dismayed when they learned the Camden County Library District Board of Trustees recently considered a permanent shutdown for one of the smallest of the six branches it operates near Lake of the Ozarks.
The government leaders discussed the idea in at least one meeting that was closed to the public, library director Michael Davis confirmed in a recent interview. To close the meeting, the library board cited the real estate exemption of Missouri’s Sunshine Law, which generally requires open meetings and open records for public bodies.
The news of talks to possibly close a branch library came to light last month due to the writings of local blogger Dave Maupin. He’s a retired Los Angeles-area law enforcement officer who now lives in the lake area. Maupin says he serves as informal political reporter in the county of 42,000 residents — where there aren’t many professional journalists.
Both blogger Maupin and Library Director Davis declined to go on air for this report, though they agreed to talk to a reporter.
Maupin says he attended a library board meeting on June 16 and posted about the meeting on his blog three days later. Soon his post fueled plenty of discussion about the library on platforms like Facebook — where misinformation is easy to find.
Library director Davis told Ozarks Public Radio that he’s been advocating to increase state pension contributions for the library’s 31 employees, 17 of whom are full-time workers.
The Camden County Library District is relatively small. There are six branch libraries, funded by a budget last year just shy of $1.9 million. Compare that to the library district in the Springfield area, with 10 branches and a budget almost 10 times bigger.
Closing one of Camden County’s smallest libraries was thought of as a way to pay for increased contributions to LAGERS, the state retirement pension system. It covers many Missouri library workers.
Davis says it costs the library district roughly $35 each time a book is checked out at the system’s smallest branch, Stoutland. It costs about $17 each time a patron enters the building. In Stoutland, Davis says the building had just under 2,000 visits by library users in the first five months of this year — less than 10 percent of the visitor count at the system’s biggest branch in Camdenton.
Davis says at this time, the library can’t find a way to way to increase those pension contributions without cutting a branch, and that he and the board president decided not to include either question on the agenda for the next library board meeting on July 12. In-between board meetings — on June 29 — the district announced on Facebook that no branches will be closed.
Residents including Bolch and Apperson say they weren’t thrilled that the library board talked about shuttering one of the six locations behind closed doors last month.
“We as a community deserve to understand what’s going on when it’s our dollars at work," Apperson says.
Library Director Davis says he consulted an attorney about using the Sunshine Law’s real-estate exemption allowing for a closed session — and got the all-clear. (The attorney, Adam Sommer, says he can’t comment due to attorney-client confidentiality.)
Jean Maneke is the Missouri Press Association’s attorney, widely considered an expert on Missouri’s open-government law. She reviewed Dave Maupin’s blog article at KSMU’s request. Based on that information, she says it looks like the time wasn’t ripe for the library board to invoke the Sunshine Law’s real-estate exception.
Maneke says, "The exception that you’re talking about is the one that is for leasing, for purchase or for sale of real estate. So when you get to the point that you’ve got some real estate that you and the board are looking at leasing, or where you’re thinking about selling your real estate, or you’re thinking about buying real estate from a third party, then that is the discussion that can go into a closed session. Because it's just like you’re talking among yourselves about what is our negotiating position going to be.”
For now, Camden County’s 19,000 library cardholders will continue to have six branches at their service.
