Library’s overseers find lots to check out
The quote was notable. “This is the first time I’ve seen this. I want to know. We all need to know.”
The speaker was Tom Owens, president of the board of trustees for the Pine Bluff/Jefferson County Library System. And he was referring to the news that the library was in the middle of a lawsuit. To the snippy expression, “Who knew?” the answer would be: hardly anyone.
We can’t recall that library board meetings ever amounted to much in the way of news. But these meetings, whew, it’s always something. It’s so much that our reporter, Eplunus Colvin, has to break up the news into multiple parts.
The fact that there is an outstanding lawsuit seeking at least $80,000 in damages, not to mention back pay, from a former employee, and it would appear that the board didn’t know about it, speaks volumes about the lackluster job the board has done at overseeing the library’s affairs.
When the county judge put three new members on the board, well, maybe he didn’t go far enough.
Even the director, Bobbie Morgan, was fuzzy on the details, although she did remember asking for an appropriation to cover the $80,000.
One of the newer board members, Glenda Daniels, may well be the one to get to the bottom of this mess, based on her comments and questions she posed to Morgan.
“What is this for?” she asked the director at this week’s meeting. “Is there a lawsuit we are unaware of? What are the specifics of this? Why were you requesting this $80,000 and when you requested this money from this millage, where is the documentation?”
Yes, where is the documentation? That’s another frightening bit of this drama.
“The construction budget, the bond money, none of that is listed on the reports we get and that is normal things that we should know,” Daniels said.
Daniels said she’s been asking for the paperwork for quite a while now and is getting miffed that she’s not getting it.
“We shouldn’t have to search and ask five or six times where is this information at,” she told reporter Colvin after the meeting.
No, indeed not.
It’s good that Daniels is bird-dogging Morgan on these issues. Somebody needs to. Thirteen million dollars, give or take, has been used from a new millage to pay for the new library and to renovate the other branches. That is taxpayer money, and it goes without saying that the public needs to know where every dollar of it has gone.
Morgan is retiring around the first of April, and she said if looking for documents is how the board wants her to spend her remaining days and weeks, that’s what she’ll do. It’s unfortunate that she can’t go out on a higher note than this, but under the circumstances, we can’t think of a better use of her time, and the sooner the better.