A conservative Utah coalition wants the Salt Lake City Council to get tough on Internet pornography at city public libraries.

Saying he has little faith in the Salt Lake City Library Board, Arthur Brady, libraries liaison for Communities for Decency, says his group is taking its case to the council. Tuesday, Brady's group will ask the council to force the Salt Lake City Library System to install Internet pornography filters on its public computers.

"The Salt Lake City Library Board has had a policy in place for a number of years and is just absolutely dismissive of any filtering device," Brady said.

While the library board hasn't decided whether it will adopt filters, both budgets it forwarded to the City Council don't include the $22,000 in state grants to libraries that have the filters. Under the Children's Internet Protection Act, passed by the Legislature this year, city and county libraries that don't install filters won't be eligible for state funds. A similar federal law forbids non-filtered libraries from gaining federal funds.

The library board will meet Thursday and again in June and should have a decision before the City Council adopts its budget (most likely on June 17), board Chairman Roger Sandack said. Right now, the board is still seeking public comment about whether it will filter or not, he said.

"The difficulty we've had is this bill isn't protecting children, it is taking away free access to information," Sandack said.

The problem is that filters are often overly restrictive and prevent patrons from accessing legitimate Web sites. And filtering companies won't make public the types of information they are blocking for "philosophical or religious motivations," Sandack said.

Moreover, he says, filters aren't foolproof, so why spend the money to install them?

"The fact is you can get around filters very easily, and all these kids know how to do it," Sandack said. "It's as simple as two strokes on the computer."

And money, more than principle, seems to be working against filtering in Salt Lake City. It would cost the library system $80,000-$150,000 to install filters and ongoing labor costs to monitor when filters can be taken off for brief times for certain patrons.

"It's doubling or tripling the amount of time spent on supervision," Sandack said. "It's a ludicrous waste of time" especially since librarians already monitor Internet use and evict people who repeatedly access pornography or sex chat rooms.

Sandack did say it was likely the library would filter computers in the children's book section.

At City Hall, the council is similarly worried about cash, especially since the library is asking for a $1.7 million tax increase this year to help fund its operations.