Eight months ago, Josephine County Commissioners put their local library in limbo after terminating the lease of the Grants Pass, Oregon, branch.

It came after years of turmoil about how the library should be funded and more recent political pressure from county commissioners.

Jennifer Roberts is the co-chair of Grants Pass Friends of the Library and spoke with OPB’s “All Things Considered” host Crystal Ligori about the ongoing turmoil.

The following transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

Crystal Ligori: I would love to start with just a little bit of history and context, because the lease at the center of this debate goes back to 2008. Can you talk a little bit about what was happening at that time and the nonprofit that was created in the aftermath?

Jennifer Roberts: After losing federal money from timber dollars, the county was put in a very difficult place and chose to close the libraries in order to fund public safety.

A group of us local citizens banded together and we formed a nonprofit called Josephine Community Libraries Inc., and we reopened the libraries with matching county money, volunteers and donations.

Then in 2008, the county, which had given us a matching grant, offered to let us have the building for $1 a year lease. They would maintain the outside of the building and Josephine Community Libraries would operate the inside, and that agreement lasted up until today.

Grant County moves to cut funding for its only public library

Ligori: Then a decade later, in 2017, voters approved a new taxing district to provide permanent funding for the county’s four libraries. Can you tell us more about the Josephine Community Library District?

Roberts: It’s a special district, which means the money that’s collected only goes towards the district, it doesn’t go through the county.

When that special district formed, the governance of Josephine Community Libraries Inc., the nonprofit, disbanded and handed everything over to the district in a very happy and amiable process.

Everybody was thrilled to have stable funding, and they were happy to disband and pass that along to the district.

Josephine County commissioners complicate the approval of a new library lease

Ligori: Fast forward to earlier this year, county commissioners initially revoked the library’s lease, and then they seemed to backtrack. Can you talk us through what’s happened since January?

Roberts: Yeah, it was all very surprising and very shocking.

The commissioners, seemingly out of nowhere, wanted to meet with the library to renegotiate the lease [in December of 2024]. This is a year before it’s set to expire, so it’s sort of confusing why they’d want to do that.

They initially approached the library director and asked her to meet on Dec. 23. When she told them that she wouldn’t meet without legal representation, she gave them several other dates in January when she could meet.

And then on Jan. 6, when they terminated the lease, their stated cause was that they were only terminating the lease in order to get the library director to the table.

After that, we just didn’t hear anything.

There was a huge public outcry, the community was furious and then the commissioners just kind of went silent. They never sent any sort of official communication to the library, stating the termination of the lease. They were just not communicating at all.

In March, we were set to have the two boards meet and the night before that meeting, we found out through a Facebook post of a [library] supporter that she had talked to one of the commissioners and the meeting was canceled, but that had never been [communicated] to the library board.

Josephine County commissioners terminate lease with Grants Pass Library

So the library board showed up anyway, saying, “Well, we’ve had no official communication,” and the commissioners did not show up.

Then they assigned Commissioner [Chris] Barnett to be the liaison, and they went to work between June and July. Everybody thought they had hammered out a relatively fair lease, and there was hope that this would be, we’d be able to put this behind us.

And then in a really dramatic meeting mid-August, Commissioner [Andreas] Blech shut down the entire meeting, and that’s kind of a little bit where we stand now.

Note:

OPB did reach out to Josephine County’s three commissioners for comment. Commissioner Chris Barnett clarified that the library does have a new lease approved by the city, which the library chose to reject on Aug. 21, 2025.

“They do have a lease that was approved by the board, whether the library signs it or not is up to them,” said Barnett.

At issue he says, is a termination-for-convenience clause which was reinserted by Commissioner Andreas Blech moments before the most recent vote. It allows the county to end the lease, at any time, with a 30-day notice.

Barnett said the two other commissioners want that clause back because it had been in the previous lease agreements.

“I took it out because the library didn’t want that in there and I presented that and I got shut down,” he said. “I’m really trying to fight hard for the library here, I know it’s important. I believe in the library.”

Ligori: Jen, why should people who don’t live in Grants Pass care about all this?

Roberts: That’s a great question. I think the reason is, this is not something that’s going to stay in Grants Pass. I think everybody should be worried about their own library shutting, about their own beloved institutions being attacked like this.

And I think that one thing 2007 showed, and currently is showing, is that it’s very easy to tear down a beloved institution and very, very difficult to build it back up again.

This community loves its library, and the only reason that the commissioners are being held accountable is that library supporters came out en masse and it’s only through their support and their standing up and saying, “Oh, hell no,” that light was even shown on this. That we were able to stand up to the commissioners.

So we’re just very grateful to the library supporters in this community.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/09/13/josephine-county-library-dispute/