Library system chief leaving on sour note

Not to write Bobbie Morgan’s occupational obituary prematurely, but her exit from here has not been well planned.

She has made it clear that she is resigning her position as director of the Pine Bluff/Jefferson County Library System. Apparently, she made that known several months ago.

Her position has been that, because of covid-19 and the fact that she’s in a higher-risk category for having something bad happen to her if she were to become infected with the coronavirus, she wanted to work remotely, and she communicated that to the system’s board of directors. She also came up with a proposal to do that.

The board has tried to work with her and said it wanted its attorney to go over what she had drawn up. That document still had her working remotely, being paid a rather handsome sum for the part-time work and also being paid something extra for her health insurance premiums.

Enter County Judge Gerald Robinson and Mayor Shirley Washington. Both have a vested interest in what goes on at the library. The city’s mayor gets to appoint six members to the library board, and the county judge gets five.

They both hit the ceiling when they heard that the board was considering allowing Morgan to work remotely. And why hasn’t the board been working on a replacement for her position when members have known for months that she was leaving? Well, that’s a good question, too.

Perhaps because of the pressure that the mayor and county judge exerted, the board declined to offer that modified contract to Morgan. And at that point, Morgan turned in her resignation, effective April 2.

In the meantime, she told the board, she would be working remotely. Now, we are in the middle of a pandemic, and we are working from home a lot, and many people are in and out of work environments quite a bit. But working remotely to Morgan was to work from Georgia. That’s just not tenable.

The library system has just opened the centerpiece of the system with a brand-new facility on Main Street, as well as opened all of the branches around the county. So it’s hard to imagine how someone could run all of that from three states away.

But apparently away she went.

At a board meeting last week, her assistant, Ricky Williams, who was standing in for Morgan, said his boss had told the staff that she would be working remotely and had cleaned out her desk, loaded up her house in a U-Haul and moved away. As Williams put it succinctly: “She’s gone.”

We can’t see how that’s going to end well for Morgan. Perhaps she is OK with that. At the meeting, the board passed a resolution saying that after Morgan’s vacation ends in early January, she needs to be back at work — physically coming in the door and working. It’s hard to imagine that happening now.

That’s a shame, at least from our perspective. She came in three years ago to shepherd along some $14 million worth of construction and renovations. And she did it. To leave on such a sour note seems unnecessary in light of all the positives associated with her tenure. But one also doesn’t just move far away and plan to work from that faraway place without getting approval from one’s boss — or in this case, bosses.

As County Judge Robinson was overheard saying with a laugh, “I wish I could move to Florida and still be county judge here.”

Exactly.