Advocates for the 14 part-time Baltimore County Public Library librarians who were fired — then quickly reinstated — weeks before Thanksgiving asked the Baltimore County Council for a more permanent reprieve.

Last week, the library board parted ways with CEO Sonia Alcántara-Antoine after receiving blowback from employees and the community for the firings.

On Monday night, six Baltimore County residents spoke during the public comment portion of a Baltimore County Council meeting to advocate for the 14 librarians. Their jobs were to be phased out gradually this year, but Alcántara-Antoine fired them over a Zoom call, giving some an hour to collect their things in a garbage bag before staff escorted them out.

Though the library board secured their reinstatement, the jobs are still not secure beyond the end of the current fiscal year.

IAM Local 4538 President Anita Bass wants to make sure the positions are protected.

“We need to find out and get information if their job is secure past June 30, 2026,” she said. “We do not know, and they do not know. They were told it was on pause, the removal of their jobs, and also that there was going to be a softer way or softer blow to remove them.”

The library system’s former human resources director, Robin Linton, left the library last month. Bass and others have asked for the county to take over the human resources functions for the library.

Councilmen Izzy Patoka and Julian Jones both thanked Bass for her testimony and assured her and the five other people who offered their support of the county’s library employees that the council was listening.

“If I were you, I would not lose any sleep over the disposition of those 14 workers,” Jones told Bass. “I have a feeling they’ll be here to stay.”

Patoka said that budget season will be underway after the council reconvenes in 2026, and suggested — given the library system’s recent dysfunction — that the councilmen should call in library representatives, including Bass, during budget hearings.

“The way you articulate public policy is through your budget,” the Pikesville Democrat said. “If our public policy is to support librarians, then, in this case, we should articulate that through the budget.”

Former Baltimore County library staffer Nicole Dvorak, warned the council that even though Alcántara-Antoine is gone the library’s board of trustees also was responsible for the dysfunction.

Another resident, Robert Jackson, told the council that he thought the board of trustees did not have Baltimore County taxpayers’ best interests at heart.

“I found it very distributing that tax dollars were spent to go against the union,” he said.

Those criticisms continued Tuesday morning at a library board of trustees meeting. Bass and Dvorak were both back, along with library advocates Ed Schneider and Rachel Jackson.

While they thanked the board for listening to the staff, they cautioned that the fight was not over. The board, Dvorak and Bass said, had thwarted supervisors’ attempts to unionize.

Schneider urged board members to “spend a day in the library” to learn the sorts of stresses that librarians and circulation staff endure.

Some of the part-time librarians told The Banner they frequently break up fights, stop sexual activity and drug use in the bathrooms and deal with belligerent people who are grappling with mental illnesses.

Alcántara-Antoine has only been gone from the system for less than a week, and the library board has said little about hiring a successor and what kinds of candidates they are seeking.