Earlier this month, county commissioners in Josephine County in southern Oregon voted to allow a couple to opt out of paying taxes to the Josephine Community Library District, after the couple alleged they do not benefit from library services. Since that decision, four more people in that county have requested to be removed from the district.
Now the library district is pursuing legal action against the Board of Commissioners, hoping to stem the tide of withdrawals that could lead to a host of problems – among them, a shortage of funds and the need to create a system of checks to issue library cards only to people who are opted into the tax.
During public comment about the couple's petition, some members of the public commented that the library offers "woke" book titles that they too did not support. Ironically, though, one of the two successful petitioners, Mike Pelfry, also unsuccessfully ran for the library board this year and lost. Was his bid an attempt to shake up the library board and even defund it? Or is his current effort some type of retaliation for not gaining the support of voters? (The library district was only created in 2017, after gaining the support of voters.)
This is a dangerous precedent, and we can only hope that the effort to opt out of the library district is shot down by a higher court – because what's next? Will people who are unable or unwilling to have children ask to be relieved of paying taxes to local school districts? Will people aim to opt out of other districts that provide essential services like roads and fire departments?
Oregon state law does allow people to opt out of tax districts. According to verbiage in ORS 198.870, "The petition shall be approved if it has not been, or is not or would not be, feasible for the territory described in the petition to receive service from the district." While the word "feasible" can certainly be up for debate, what it signals to us is that some type of physical or geographic barrier would have to exist to keep a property from receiving service; in the case of a school district or a library, as examples, perhaps there isn't a road that leads from the property to the school. It just doesn't seem to be the case here.
What definitely doesn't seem feasible is that two of the three county commissioners in Josephine County would opt to buck the will of the people, who majority-voted to create a library district, by allowing people to cherry-pick which taxes they pay in their geographic area.
Education – by way of public libraries and schools – benefits everyone. Education allows people to be more functional and compassionate employees, neighbors, parents and community members. The majority of us as Americans have benefited from the investments that those before us put in these systems of education and community engagement, going all the way back to Ben Franklin and his monumental effort to establish lending libraries in the United States. We'd be willing to bet that at least one of the petitioners who now want to opt out of that vital community service in Josephine County also benefited from public libraries and schools at some point in their lifetimes – maybe long before the word "woke" was used in its modern iteration – and now reap the benefits of that public investment in them. Public services may not benefit us directly, but they benefit us all as a whole.
