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Dubuque County residents press supervisors over library materials; library pledges formal review

Dubuque County Board of Supervisors · March 16, 2026
AI-Generated Content: All content on this page was generated by AI to highlight key points from the meeting. For complete details and context, we recommend watching the full video. so we can fix them.

Summary

Residents urged the Board of Supervisors to restrict access to certain library titles they called explicit; librarians and trustees defended selection policies and outlined family-account options. The county’s library director said two challenged books will undergo the library’s formal review process.

Residents and library officials squared off at the Dubuque County Board of Supervisors’ March 16 meeting over several books in the Dubuque County Library District collection.

Jane Schmidt, who gave her address to the board, told supervisors the exemption that shields libraries from obscenity prosecutions “has been severely abused” and singled out the title Let’s Talk About It: The Teen’s Guide… as “very graphic” and targeting readers as young as 12. “We are paying for these books, not how we want our tax dollars to be used,” Schmidt said.

The issue drew several other public comments. Erica…

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