Library Director Denies Elmwood Park Advocate's Request For Next 'Community Conversation'

The library director for the Elmwood Park Public Library denied a meeting room reservation request that was submitted by the Elmwood Park Advocate. We immediately appealed the decision.

On October 21, the Elmwood Park Advocate submitted a reservation request for the sixth and final “Community Conversation” of the year. We planned to hold a gathering on Saturday, November 15, that celebrates the senior citizens of Elmwood Park, who have attended our events over the past several months and helped make the work of the newsletter a success.

However, on October 26, Library Director Michael Consiglio informed the Elmwood Park Advocate that we must pay $100 for the Ferrentino Meeting Room or else there will be no “Community Conversation” in November.

Immediately, the newsletter objected and requested an opportunity to appeal, and an appeal was granted two days later.

Elmwood Park Advocate Editor Kevin Gosztola will go before the Library Board’s policy committee on November 10 at 4 p.m. He will present information and documentation related to the library’s own meeting room policy that shows that the library director has treated the newsletter unfairly.

The committee meeting will take place before the Library Board of Trustees’ monthly meeting. After Gosztola’s presentation, the committee will make a recommendation to the full Library Board. Trustees will then consider the recommendation during the Library Board meeting that evening.

We invite subscribers and readers, who can attend the meetings on November 10, to come and show their support. (RSVP here.)

The newsletter has held monthly “Community Conversations” in the library’s main meeting room for five months. But since the end of July, it is our opinion that Consiglio has attempted to harass us into paying $100 to use the meeting room.

Each time that the Elmwood Park Advocate pointed out that the meeting room policy does not require the newsletter to pay, or that it is discriminatory to charge the newsletter, the library director backed down.

That allowed the newsletter to hold “Community Conversations” in September and October, which focused on immigrants in Elmwood Park and the fear and anxiety that has been generated by ICE operations in the Chicagoland area.

Now, Consiglio has put his foot down. The library’s paid attorneys wrote a legal opinion after reviewing the meeting room policy. With that opinion, the library director contends he is on solid ground when it comes to demanding that any resident without a 501c3 nonprofit organization pay $100 if they wish to use a library meeting room.

A group of moms submitted a meeting room reservation request for October 27. They requested the space to put together community kits for fellow Elmwood Park residents. The library director told them that they would be treated as a “for profit organization” and said that they had to pay $100. So the group had to find another location to prepare kits for charitable giving.

Furthermore, the Elmwood Park Advocate has known for a long time that this is not simply about enforcing a meeting room policy. Consiglio informed the newsletter on July 25 that a group of unnamed people questioned the “process and rationale behind hosting [our] meetings at the library.” They specifically requested that the library interpret the policy in a manner that would require us to pay to use the main meeting room.

During September, the library director proposed a meeting room policy with provisions that would have granted him the authority to police speech at the library. It was presumably written with the intent of satisfying the group of hecklers.

“These people should like to pay a fee of $100, anybody that wants to use [a meeting room],” Consiglio further declared when he unveiled his plan.

Also, it is evident that the newsletter’s meeting room use was the catalyst for the proposal. That made the library director’s assertion that the new policy would protect “against misuse, ensuring taxpayer resources are dedicated to genuine community benefit,” rather obnoxious.

Of course, we disagree. Nonpartisan dialogue about issues of importance in the village will always be beneficial to the community.

The meeting room policy proposal was eventually withdrawn by Consiglio after the Elmwood Park Advocate reported on it, and he even acted like it had never been developed. “There is no plan to change the current approved policy,” he told residents who expressed concerns.

As the Elmwood Park Advocate has made clear, a public body like the library is not allowed to infringe upon or bar a group from broadly exercising their First Amendment rights just because a very small group of hecklers do not like the idea of that group exercising their rights

Yet this is exactly what the newsletter believes the library director has done for the past months.

We maintain that Library Director Michael Consiglio has degraded the Elmwood Park Public Library by engaging in viewpoint-based censorship. He has given many residents in Elmwood Park a reason to doubt whether free speech rights and community access to the library will remain protected and valued.

The Elmwood Park Advocate hopes that on November 10 the newsletter will be able to persuade the Library Board of Trustees to stand on the side of the First Amendment and support access to meeting rooms for every taxpaying resident.