An Orange County Superior Court judge has ordered the city of Huntington Beach to pay nearly $1 million in legal fees after it was sued for moving books deemed to contain sexual content to a restricted section of the library.
Alianza Translatinx and three Huntington Beach residents sued the city in February 2025, claiming that the policy was a violation of the California Freedom to Read Act.
Judge Lindsey Martinez agreed with the plaintiffs in a September decision. She also signed a writ of mandate, created by the ACLU Foundation of Southern California and plaintiff Erin Spivey, stating the city must remove all signage regarding restricted books, reestablish a teen section and eliminate parental consent requirements for minors to access library materials.
The conservative Huntington Beach City Council unanimously voted in closed session in October to appeal Martinez’s ruling. But now she says that the city is on the hook for $959,853.73 of attorney’s fees, divided between Jenner & Block, the First Amendment Coalition, Community Legal Aid SoCal and the ACLU Foundation of Southern California.
Spivey, a former librarian in Huntington Beach, is one of the plaintiffs in the case and a candidate for City Council this fall. She said in an interview Wednesday that the fight has been frustrating.
“We’re throwing away money at this point on an issue that the [Huntington Beach] people rejected in June via the ballot box, the courts rejected in September, the state Legislature rejected via the Freedom to Read Act,” she said. “Why are we continuing to fight every single level of society that doesn’t want this to happen, including your own voters?
“This really is the prime example of why I’m running, because the city just continues to throw good money after bad on these kind of culture war issues that the people of Huntington Beach are not interested in,” Spivey added.
The council first passed a resolution in 2023 stopping children from accessing books deemed to have sexual content, eventually moving them to a restricted area on the fourth floor of the Central Library. Critics called that illegal censorship.
A proposed parent-guardian children’s book review board, also approved by the council, was never actually formed and was repealed when Surf City voters passed Measure A last year. Measure A also stated that the city’s director of community and library services would handle selection and use of library materials.
Huntington Beach City Atty. Mike Vigliotta has said the city has used outside council doing pro bono work for the ACLU lawsuit. But a payment of nearly $1 million would still seem significant for a city that needed to dip into reserves to pass a structurally balanced 2025-26 budget.
Szabo writes for Times Community News.
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