A version of this conversation aired during Morning Edition on WVIA Radio.
Bradford County Commissioners and the Friends of the Bradford County Library are locked in a battle over the library’s budget, hours and even its collection. Most recently, the commissioners unveiled a 50 percent budget cut and unexpectedly fired the library’s interim director.
WVIA’s Isabela Weiss has been following all of the back and forth, spending quite a bit of time in Bradford County.
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SARAH: So there's a lot going on here, right? And you've been following this for more than a year. So do you want to catch us up a bit?
ISABELA: So I started following the whole situation about last August, I believe. And very long story short, there's been a lot of fighting over this library. I mean, back in August (2023) there was a secret meeting that happened on the Bradford County Library where commissioners were there and members of the library board, but the public was not notified of this meeting, and there was a discussion - there's also documents that have been leaked onto social media showing that there were some plans to close down the library, and it just kind of, you know, fell apart from there. There was a prior lawsuit waged against the county commissioners by library supporters, the Friends of the Bradford County Library, that has been since dropped, but now we're kind of seeing that come back again. I recently went up to a Friends meeting, and some members, including their new president, Anna Jennings, spoke about potential litigation and potentially following up with yet another ... Sunshine Act case against the county commissioners.
SARAH: The legalities here are mostly tied to the Sunshine Act. Do you want to explain a little bit about what that is and why what the county commissioners have been doing could be in violation of it?
ISABELA: The Pennsylvania Sunshine Act essentially states that meetings must be held in the public eye. I mean government bodies, government agencies from your, you know, township supervisors to county commissioners, they need to have their meetings for the public, and the public should be able to raise comments against or for what their supervisors or commissioners or council members are doing. And so there's a lot of questions on whether or not the Bradford County Board of Commissioners have been following that. I mean, there's a lot of questions about, you know, closed door meetings and decisions to, you know, fire the interim director Rebecca Troup-Hodgdon without, you know, people having any sort of prior knowledge of that decision. I mean, it came as a shock to members of the Friends group ... and residents as well.
SARAH: So, how are the Friends of the Library and the commissioners, from what you can tell, thinking about moving forward with this?
ISABELA: Yeah, so the commissioners, their next meeting is on Dec. 12, and in that meeting, they're going to talk about their budget and hopefully vote on it. And that budget is in the something like $70 million in that county budget. I mean, the library makes up — we did the math here — 0.33 percent, so ... about a third of a percent. And that budget, I mean, it cuts it down from about, you know, $400,000 a year for that library down to about ... $200,000 a year that will be funded by the county. And so that's what the commissioners are doing and kind of the route that they're going on. We've, you know, asked for comment from several members on the commission, asked for comment ... from the county office themselves, and really haven't received anything at this point. But we'll, of course, be following that going forward. And then when it comes to the Friends group... I went to that meeting last week, and they're looking into potential litigation. They did not release the name of any lawyer at this point, but that is the route they're going down. One Friends member recently told me that they are willing to put all of their funding, all of the Friends group's funding, into possible litigation. And her words, you know, her thought on it was, there's no point in saving a closed library.
SARAH: All right, well, it sounds like there's plenty more to come. Isabela, thank you.
ISABELA: Yeah, thank you for having me.
