On Thursday, Feb. 27, the Garfield County Commissioners (BOCC) will listen for a second time to candidates for the Glenwood Springs position on the Garfield County Library Board of Trustees. And Jocelyn Durrance, who served as a trustee representing Carbondale for five years, is worried.
“I think there is a group within Garfield County who is making huge efforts to stack the board with trustees who represent an ideology that is not consistent with the mission of public libraries,” Durrance told The Sopris Sun. “And, unfortunately, what’s happening in Garfield County is merely a microcosm of what’s happening nationwide.”
Her concern stems from a two-year effort by a few western Garfield County residents to change library policy, beginning with a persistent campaign against Japanese manga books at the Silt Library. This, she said, led to a series of events that ultimately resulted in last year’s BOCC resolution to take control of the library trustee appointment process.
“The [BOCC] would make the final appointment and the library board did not have a vote in that appointment,” she explained. “That’s when it became so clear that there was an agenda behind this.”
That agenda was writ large at the February library board meeting when New Castle resident May Gray presented a copy of a Facebook post by Trish O’Grady, an administrator of the Garfield County Patriots page, encouraging people to apply for the Glenwood Springs library trustee position. “If the commissioners appoint a conservative person, we just may have a majority [of] four to three. Then real changes can happen like terminating their liberal Executive Director Jamie LaRue,” the post reads.
“Are you guys being directed to [fire Jamie LaRue] and is this why the BOCC is really trying to take over the Board?” Gray added.
Durrance attended that meeting along with Susan Use, a former library board member who re-applied for her Glenwood Springs position late last year. At the time, Commission Chair John Martin was on sick leave and Commissioners Tom Jankovsky and Mike Samson were making the appointments. They were split — Use was Jankovsky’s choice but not Samson’s — and the process started over.
At the February library board meeting, Use said the Facebook post was a surprise. She wanted to know where O’Grady got her information. “We have a majority of four to three.That means [O’Grady] is saying that, on the board, three of you are extremely conservative. Is that true?” she queried. One member of the board said they do not respond to public comments. Use wished the board good luck. “This should be front and center with the board,” she warned.
O’Grady said during the meeting that she stands by what she put in the post. “I’m surprised that you’re surprised that that’s [what] I would personally like to do is find a new director, which is in the purview of the board itself,” she said to Use.
Durrance told The Sopris Sun that she has more than 30 years of local public library experience. “What I saw was that this group basically wanted to have a very strong say in what the events and material on the [library] shelves were,” she said. “I saw this as a violation of my rights.” She added that she wants library users to have access to a variety of viewpoints and come to their own conclusions via critical thinking. “If you limit the information available, that cannot happen,” she said.
She also believes the library is not a babysitting service and that it is the responsibility of the parent or caretaker to accompany young children. “If they don’t want their young children being in certain parts of the library or being exposed to certain materials, then it’s their responsibility to steer them in the direction of what they’d like their children to be exposed to,” she said.
Durrance knows why she was not re-appointed to the library board. She said Jankovsky told her during a personal phone call that she was behind “groupthink” on the library board. She wasn’t clear on what he meant by groupthink. “He said [something to the effect of], well, it just seems like the library board doesn’t listen to other viewpoints,” she recalled to The Sopris Sun.
In a Feb. 18 email to The Sopris Sun, inquiring what his reasons were for not reappointing Durrance, Jankovsky wrote, “I wanted to see more diversity of opinion, robust discussion and less groupthink on the library board.”
This reasoning varied from what he said at the Dec. 16, 2024 meeting, when his choice for the Glenwood Springs position differed from that of Samson. Jankovsky opted to reappoint a sitting library board member. “I felt Susan Use [was] the correct person for that,” he said at the meeting. “She is a current library board member. I felt that it would be important to have some consistency on the board and have that depth of her being there.”
Durrance cannot explain why Jankovsky made his choices but she feels strongly that if the BOCC is trying to stack the library board with politically conservative members, the library and the community are in trouble. “That is not the mission of a public library,” she said.
She now focuses her efforts on educating the Garfield County public and researching national conservative groups and agendas such as Project Blitz and Project 2025 and their influences on libraries and legislation.
“When I talk to people about what’s going on, they’ve heard about the book banning but they don’t realize that there is a lot of underground operation pushing this effort,” she said. “I was a career librarian for over 30 years and I feel a responsibility to our community to find out how this is coming to be and help people understand why it is so important.”
The Garfield County Commissioners conduct candidate interviews for the Glenwood Springs seat on the Garfield County Library Board of Trustees Thursday, Feb. 27, at 9am at the county administration building, 108 8th Street in Glenwood.