Behind the censure: Here's why the Ozark City Council reprimanded its mayor last week
When Ozark residents arrived at a city council meeting on Tuesday, Oct. 3, they found copies of a letter from Mayor Mark Blankenship neatly placed in every seat. Two weeks later, the city council deemed that letter, among other things, cause for Blankenship’s censure.
Under an official city letterhead, the mayor stated that he had been “under attack” because of a community group called We the People, Dale County. He specifically criticized one of the group’s founding members, Ozark resident Bryant Fontenot.
In the weeks prior, the community had become aware of the mayor’s call for LGBTQ books to be removed from the Ozark-Dale County Library, in which Blankenship threatened library funding. Public debate ensued around whether minors should be able to access sexually explicit or LGBTQ content in the library, and citizens found a compromise in increasing the required age to access young adult books.
Fontenot and others formed We the People, Dale County in the midst of the debacle, dedicating themselves to protecting citizens’ constitutional rights, specifically the right to free speech.
“The issue with the library and those books which may have an LGBTQ+ tilt was not my concern,” Fontenot said. “There's nothing about that lifestyle that I find attractive, endearing, good, wholesome nor consistent with my Judeo-Christian beliefs. But when the citizens started being attacked, and with the likelihood of books being taken from a library, that's something I just couldn't stand for.”
Fontenot has always considered himself a civically responsible man, and since retiring from the U.S. Army after over 40 years of service, that hasn’t changed. When he saw the texts that Blankenship sent to library director Karen Speck and library board member Monica Carroll calling for the removal of LGBTQ books from the library, he knew he had to do something.
That included calling for the city council to censure the mayor, or issue a statement of strong disapproval of his actions in this situation. Over the last two months, more and more Ozark citizens joined the push for the censure, and in that time, Blankenship continued to harass multiple private citizens in response to their criticism of them.
After Fontenot first asked the city council for the censure, Blankenship sent him a text that read, “looks like you made a fool of yourself!” with a link to an article. In a message to another community group leader, Adam Kamerer of the Ozark-Dale Library Alliance, Blankenship wrote, “Hope you have a good lawyer!”
On Oct. 17, Ozark city councilman Les Perrault motioned for the city council to take the official step of reprimanding Blankenship for his behavior. The motion passed 3-2.
“Mayor Blankenship did in his official capacity presumptuously misrepresent the position of the city council while implying the threat of defunding one of our town’s most important public resources, which action he has no authority to execute unilaterally,” Perrault read from the resolution. “Mayor Blankenship implied a threat of legal action against a private citizen for the latter’s exercising their First Amendment rights and then did publicly mock this citizen online.”
The mayor believed that the censure was unwarranted.
“None of y’all are helping me and these department heads run this city,” Blankenship said to the council. “When we have negative people out here blasting me and my department heads and you expect me to sit back and not say anything? It’s not going to happen, so you might as well add the censure thing to your agenda every week because I’m representing the 99% of people in Ozark who support me and these hard-working department heads and employees.”
In a town of just over 14,000 people, the group We The People, Dale County has garnered 336 members, and the Ozark-Dale Library Alliance has over 1,000.
As for Fontenot, he said he’s happy with the compromise that allows the LGBTQ books to remain in the library and the censure of Blankenship.
“It's a done deal,” he said. “It's time for people to heal.”
Hadley Hitson covers children's health, education and welfare for the Montgomery Advertiser. She can be reached at hhitson@gannett.com. To support her work, subscribe to the Advertiser.
This article originally appeared on Montgomery Advertiser: Ozark City Council censures mayor following library funding debacle
