The steps that got us to the lawsuit : IMC Worcester

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The steps that got us to the lawsuit
by Kevin Ksen Thursday, Jul. 06, 2006 at 9:53 PM

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It was just a brief blurb within Worcester Magazine, something to the effect that David McMahon at Dismas House was raising concerns about the Worcester Public Library’s new policy limiting borrowing privileges of Dismas House residents and homeless shelters.

And so on January 2nd, Real Solutions submitted a public records request to the Worcester Public Library seeking to obtain this list and better understand the genesis and reasoning behind the Worcester Public Library’s new discriminatory policy against the homeless. As the 10 day response period wound down the answer arrived; there was indeed a new “draft” policy in place discriminating against the homeless and in fact it was a policy directed against anyone that lived at one of 32 addresses the WPL had blacklisted and 13 others where an agency was responsible for residents’ borrowing privileges. Worcester Indymedia first covered this story back on January 25th.

The response to Real Solution’s request included the address list, as well as several additional parts, dated 12/08/05, each labeled as a draft. Together the implemented policy states;

“The Worcester Public Library limits those residents of shelters that have been contacted by the library to 2 items per checkout.”
“While in a Transitional Housing Program, residents are limited to two items per checkout, unless the resident presents a letter signed by the director of their program allowing the patron full borrowing privileges and accepting full responsibility for the safe return of all materials, including lost book payments.”
Additionally, for agencies serving those who are homeless, the policy creates Firm Cards, for “agencies willing to accept financial responsibility for their(sic) borrowing by their residents”.

The library rests their decision to implement this policy on their “fiduciary responsibility” to preserve the library’s resources. During this spring’s meeting with Real Solutions and Legal Assistance the library stated that they believed that 20% of their losses were to residents of shelters and transitional housing programs.

In response local advocates for the homeless stand firm in stating that it is wrong to discriminate against someone because they are homeless, poor, in treatment or seeking help.Go down to the library and sign up for a library card and you can quickly start checking out 40 books, CD's etc., give them an address on the blacklist and your ability to use all of the library's resources is immediately cut back to just two items. Someone who is homeless, or living within a program should be treated as a person facing the same borrowing privileges as anyone else, not borrowing privileges set by a blacklist based on people’s perceptions, expectations or for that matter what someone did who lived in their same building five years ago! Would you want to be judged by what the person that lived in your apartment previously did? As with the ongoing siting debate, it is argued that we cannot define some groups of people as less desirable thereby limiting their rights.

But the ongoing discussions with the library failed to reach agreement on this point, nor were alternative policies to reduce losses pursued. Additionaly the groups involved were unsuccess in efforts to access statistics to back-up the libary's loss claims. There is a list of addresses, but there does not appear to be documentation quantifying poor returns. What quickly became clear was that this was a policy targeted at people living in some sort of program. And given that many residential programs are not on the library’s list it became quite clear that the library had merely created a list from public knowledge and stories in the media of known programs and shelters.

This Spring, members of Real Solutions continued to talk to Library Board members while Legal Assistance stepped forward by filing a more complete public records request seeking back-up material and the data that had apparently already been compiled as justification for this new policy. Rather than providing the requested data, the library instead responded that a substantial payment would first need to be made by Legal Assistance.

This was a strange response given that much of the requested data was supposed to already exist as part of the library’s planning report and the cordiality in Worcester usually afforded to public records requests. Either the data had previously been compiled and formed the basis for the Library’s new policy, in which case a public records request should have been available without significant cost or the Library had not previously compiled the statistics, necessitating the charge for a research fee and undermining the whole argument explaining the genesis of the new policy.

This is one of the two arguments that buttress many’s feeling that the library set out to create a list of shelters and programs first, rather than a list of problem addresses. Secondly, in reviewing the Library’s blacklist, it is both revealing to see not only the list’s scope but also it’s incompleteness. Residential programs, shelters, and transitional housing programs all make the list. Abby’s House, the PIP, the Vets Shelter and even the normally unknown address for Daybreak, Worcester’s shelter for battered women, are all listed, but many other less well known residential programs are noticeably absent. The existing list and lack of data only reinforces people’s confusion about why some residential programs are on the list, while others are not. There doesn’t seem to be a bright line criteria defining inclusion or exclusion from the blacklist.

In the end, the lawsuit filed by Legal Assitance and the ACLU is moving forward because of an inability of local groups, agencies and friends of the Board to convince the library that this is not only a discriminatory policy, but one not based on facts nor in the best interest of our community.