Huntington Beach has two ballot initiatives related to the city’s libraries that have qualified with enough signatures, both reactions to actions the City Council has taken over the last few years.
The first initiative seeks to repeal a city law that allowed Huntington Beach to create a children’s library book review board. The second would make it harder for the city’s public library operations to be privatized, a response to council discussions early last year.
The city has notified the proponents behind the petitions for the initiatives that the OC Registrar of Voters had verified enough signatures for them to qualify. They each needed signatures from at least 10% of registered Huntington Beach voters, a bit more than 13,000 people.
The ballot initiatives will now need to go before the City Council. The next meeting is scheduled for Jan. 21, after the Jan. 7 meeting was canceled.
Once on a council agenda, the City Council could adopt the initiatives outright, avoiding the need for an election. The councilmembers could also order a report to be presented to them within 30 days or go straight to putting the questions to voters in a special election or the next general election in November 2026. A special election would cost more.
The proponents behind the initiatives say if the council doesn’t adopt their ballot initiatives outright, which they don’t expect, they hope it can be placed onto the April special election ballot, but time is running out.
Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered a special election for April 29 to fill the vacant 36th state Senate district seat. The primary will be on Feb. 25.
Carol Daus, a volunteer behind the second initiative regarding the outsourcing of services, said their initiative’s proponent, Paula Schaefer, heard Thursday from the City Clerk’s office that the OC Registrar of Voters had sent a letter to the city on Dec. 19 that enough signatures had been verified for the ballot initiative to qualify.
The initiative, backed by the nonprofit Friends of the Huntington Beach Public Library, would create a law requiring any plans to have the city’s public libraries owned or operated by a private company to get a majority vote from both the City Council and voters in an election. The initiative was launched after the City Council directed staff to solicit bids from contractors to take over the libraries’ operations, but the idea never progressed.
Daus said it’s frustrating that the Jan. 7 City Council meeting had been canceled, making it a long delay from when the initiatives submitted signatures in the fall.
“We know there is a special election,” Daus said. “We are concerned that we might miss the deadline if this is delayed much further.”
Daus said Newsom calling for a special election later in the year than expected opened up the hope again that the ballot initiative could be decided in tandem. She added that the ballot initiative has won support from people across different political ideologies.
Cathey Ryder, who co-founded the grassroots group Protect HB that gathered the signatures to overturn the library book review board, said they are in a wait-and-see situation “with the assumption that it will be on the agenda for the 21st.”
Their preference, too, is for the ballot initiative to make it onto the April special election.
The city notified Ryder on Dec. 16 that the signatures had been verified by the OC Registrar of Voters.
Ryder said a new state law that went into effect on Jan. 1, AB 1825, or the California Freedom to Read Act, not allowing book review boards like the one proposed in Huntington Beach could make the ballot initiatives moot.
The children’s library book review board, approved last year, has not yet been formed.
City Attorney Michael Gates spoke out against the new state law when it was signed by the governor and said it couldn’t be applied to Huntington Beach.
