This is an opinion column.
The Autauga-Prattville Library Board fired its director last week for releasing confidential information …
No, wait!
The Autauga-Prattville Library Board fired its director last week for some kind of crime …
Hold on.
I spent the last week trying to get a straight answer to what should have been a simple question: Why did the Autauga-Prattville Library Board fire its director, Andrew Foster?
What followed was a series of phone calls and email exchanges with the library board chairman, Ray Boles, in which Boles contradicted himself more times than I care to count, giving different reasons at different times to fit different facts.
It started last Thursday, when following a closed-door executive session, the board terminated Foster “for revealing confidential information to the press and violation of criminal law.”
In February, the public board passed a new public policy that “the library shall not purchase or otherwise acquire any material advertised for consumers ages 17 and under which contain content including, but not limited to, obscenity, sexual conduct, sexual intercourse, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender discordance.”
Additionally, patrons under 18 may not check out such books from the adult sections without a parent’s permission.
Earlier last week, the Alabama Political Reporter obtained and published email exchanges between Foster and the board. In those emails, Foster asked the board for clarification regarding the policy.
The trouble for Foster was that Boles, the board chairman, apparently acting on his own, gave Foster a list of 113 books — most with LGBTQ characters or content — that Boles wanted to be moved. But some of those books didn’t seem to violate the policy the board passed. Foster emailed the board, making them aware and asking for guidance.
When these emails wound up in the hands of Alabama Political Reporter’s Jacob Holmes, the board called Foster into an executive session where Foster was told he was being fired.
How did Holmes get the emails?
Under Alabama’s Open Records Act, every citizen has a right to inspect a public document and take a copy upon request.
Nobody leaked them. Nobody stole them. Holmes submitted a public information request to Foster, asking for emails between a public official and a public board concerning the operation of a public institution. Nothing appeared privileged or private. And Foster complied with it.
“We are an institution that’s all about open and honest information,” Foster told me when I spoke with him Friday.
Perhaps, Foster should have said were — past tense. Because that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. Far from it.
On Thursday, the board called Foster into a closed-door executive session where the board – in private — told Foster he was being fired from his public job.
“That was not the reason”
I called the board chairman Boles to ask why they had fired Foster. During our conversation, Boles tried to make a few arguments about open records.
First, he said, the public information request wasn’t legitimate because it wasn’t put on a form.
While the courts have said government bodies may require a request form, there’s nothing in the law that creates a form or says they must require a form or would keep them from honoring an email or a letter.
I explained to Boles that I have made open record requests over the phone, or even, in person. After all, the law says every citizen has a right to inspect public records. Heck, I’ve had officials give me public records without my even asking.
There was nothing illegal about that. Those documents belong to the public.
Boles changed tracks and tried a different reason.
According to Boles, the city attorney had told Foster that emails weren’t covered by the Open Records Act.
“I can tell you this, the city attorney told him that request did not cover emails,” Boles said.
This was odd, too, as I’ve requested and received emails under the Alabama Open Records Act, including emails to and from the governor of Alabama. And not just emails, but text messages, too.
You don’t have to believe me. The Alabama Department of Archives and History advises state agencies that emails are public records that must be treated like paper documents.
“Email records are subject to the same legal requirements regarding access as any of the agency’s other government records, as governed by Alabama’s open records law,” the agency says on its website.
Since that didn’t work, Boles shifted tracks again — now saying open records wasn’t the issue.
“That was not the reason he was terminated,” Boles now said.
When I tried to get him to elaborate, he would stubbornly restate the answer. Boles — and this will be important later — repeated this five times.
I thought this strange, as it was one of the two reasons the board had specifically cited, both during the meeting and in a brief statement to the press after the meeting. Was that no longer the case?
I asked Boles, but he would only repeat himself.
“I can’t because it was in the executive session, and by law, I cannot talk about what happened in the executive session,” Boles said.
Again, there’s no law that says Boles can’t tell me what was said in executive session. I’ve spoken to public officials after any number of such meetings who have told me what happened behind closed doors. Boles just didn’t want to, and as long as he’s not violating the Open Meetings Act, that’s his right, I suppose.
Don’t worry. By the end of this column, Boles will tell what happened in the executive session.
But Boles was adamant — now, at least — that Foster hadn’t been fired for revealing confidential information to the press. So I read the motion from his meeting back to him: “revealing confidential information to the press and violation of criminal law.”
“The second part,” Boles said.
But there’s an “and” in this sentence, I said.
“The second part is why he was — that’s what was the final nail in the coffin,” Boles said.
You might be wondering what the “violation of criminal law” part is about, and I wondered that, too.
Boles refused to say and told me again that it was subject to a “criminal investigation.”
I asked Boles whether a complaint had been filed somewhere with a district attorney, police department or some other investigative agency.
“There’s being one wrote up now,” Boles said. “And there’s ethics violations being wrote up as we speak, and, and [we’re] also speaking to the DA and some other people about pressing charges.”
So, it would seem, the criminal investigation was a future-looking sort of thing, and not one being led by actual investigative authorities as no actual complaint had yet been filed anywhere when I spoke with him on Friday.
When the board said it was firing Foster for a “violation of criminal law,” it wasn’t firing him for any crime he had been formally accused of, much less convicted of committing.
Later, I asked Foster directly if there was anything I needed to know about — anything the board might consider criminal?
Foster told me he recorded the executive session until he was told that was illegal and he had to stop.
Now, it might seem kind of shifty to record someone without their knowledge, and I can see how board members might get upset over that. But Alabama is what’s called a single-party state.
“If you are a participant in a conversation, you can record people without them knowing, if they’re participating in the conversation too,” explained J. Evans Bailey, an attorney for the Alabama Press Association.
The Alabama Open Meetings Act says attendees may record public proceedings except executive sessions, Bailey said, but the law is silent on whether the participants in an executive session can record themselves. There’s nothing in the law that obligates anyone in an executive session to keep what happened behind closed doors secret.
I told Boles that, if they did file a complaint, to let me know, because I’m eager to read it. He told me they would.
Next, Boles insisted the library board wasn’t trying to ban books, only to move certain books to the adult section.
This was an odd thing to say, as I hadn’t asked him a question about that and it hadn’t been one of the reasons the board cited for firing Foster, but I let him keep going.
“What we are after as a board is that, we are not after anything in the LBG[TQ] community,” Boles said. “If it’s anything about two dads walking the dog, we’re not worried about that. We only worry about one thing, if it has to do — There’s a book called ‘Finding Alaska.’ It has a whole paragraph in there about her giving a blow job. That doesn’t belong in the kids section or the young adult or the teenage section. I’m not saying it doesn’t belong in the library. It just simply needs to be moved to the other side. And that’s it. That’s what we’ve been after from day one.”
“And it’s just been an absolute nightmare.”
The book Boles speaks of is called “Looking for Alaska” by John Green. It won a number of awards and was inspired by Green’s time attending the Indian Springs School in Alabama.
Again, another matter for another day.
What did Foster do to get fired? Was it this? Was it all about where he shelved the books?
Boles, again, refused to say.
“I’m choosing not to, OK?” he said. “But I do want it very, very clear and very loudly that we have one mission — getting anything that has sex or sexuality out of the kids section. That is it.”
“That’s why he got canned.”
That was Friday.
Over the weekend, some more things happened.
On Saturday, the library board met again, in a two-minute-long meeting, to name an interim director.
According to The Montgomery Advertiser’s story about the new director, Boles said Foster had been fired for not reshelving the 113 books that he had ordered moved.
Now I was really confused.
On Monday, I reached out to Boles again.
Which reason was it?
Boles insisted the Advertiser had twisted his words and that wasn’t the reason Foster got fired.
I tried, best I could, to walk Boles back through the changing story. First, I said, the board says it fired Foster for leaking confidential information to the press …
“Yes, that’s what we did it for,” Boles interjected. “That’s why he got canned.”
Wait! What?
I told Boles I had him on record Friday saying that wasn’t the reason. After our phone call, I went back and counted. He said five times in a row that wasn’t the reason Foster was fired.
You can probably guess what happened next. Boles switched tracks again, this time saying Foster was fired after he admitted to recording the executive session.
At this point, you’re probably wondering how many times we have to run around this circle, and I still wonder that, too.
My conversation with Boles stretched for an hour. Before we finished, Boles promised he would share with me an email — the one sent by Prattville city attorney Andrew Odom to Foster, in which Foster was told he couldn’t share emails and that emails weren’t subject to the Open Records Act.
I eventually got that email, but I had to get it from Foster.
In the email, Odom does advises Foster that emails between public officials are not generally covered by the Open Records Act, but he doesn’t explicitly tell Foster not to release those documents.
“Internal communications, such as texts, emails, etc., and phone records are not typically disclosable public records,” Odom wrote.
Odom cited a 2017 advisory opinion from the Alabama Attorney General.
According to Bailey, the attorney for the Alabama Press Association, that attorney general’s opinion was disregarded by the Alabama Supreme Court in 2019, and state courts have considered emails subject to the Open Records Act since another ruling in 2010.
“If it’s somebody performing their public duties through the use of emails, they’re public records,” Bailey said. “There’s nothing that exempts them simply because they’re in an electronic form of communication.”
The Prattville-Autauga Library Board should have been clear on all of this stuff before it fired its director, but perhaps clarity was always too much to hope for.
It now seems the dispute was never over any law being broken, or over what Foster gave to the press, but rather, about the very thing Foster had asked for in the beginning — clarity over which books the library could keep on which shelves.
That included the list of 113 books Boles — not the board — gave to Foster.
In our conversations, Boles denied he ordered Foster to move the books, but an email between the two men says otherwise.
“Per are [sic] conversation yesterday I spoke to are [sic] attorney and she said you are wrong on your interpretation of our new policies and that we don’t have to vote on moving the books,” Boles wrote Foster earlier this month. “How long will it take you to tag the books and get them in the adult section?”
On Saturday, the Montgomery Advertiser reported, Boles said he had gotten the list from concerned parents who feared the content was “sexual in nature.”
“I have friends that are LG, and I love them,” Boles told the Advertiser. “I wanted to show the mad mommas that we took their concerns to heart and that any books that had a sexual nature were moved out of the children’s section. It was never about banning books or removing books. Foster pulled the books and wouldn’t put them back on the shelves in the adult section.”
So if the board really fired Foster for a reason it didn’t give when it terminated him, does that mean he gets his job back?
Probably not. In a two-minute-long meeting Saturday, the board named staff member Tammy Bear to serve as interim director.
Bear told reporters she had been informed of her promotion in a phone call the night before, which again raised questions about the Alabama Open Meetings Act. How’d they know to tell her before they met?
She will serve until a permanent director is hired.
But in a workplace that can fire you for obeying Alabama open records law, tell the world you committed crimes but then refuse to say what those crimes are, and then say it was really about what you said it was really about in the first place, but not really that …
Who the heck would ever want to work there?
Kyle Whitmire is the 2023 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. You can follow him on Threads here and subscribe to his weekly newsletter, Alabamafication.