By staff consultant Rube Goldberg
Matthew Leslie
The Fullerton City Council is having another go at the Library Board appointment process Tuesday night, October 2. “Based on community input on September 18, 2018, the Mayor requests that the City Council discuss, and members of the public to provide input, into an alternate process for appointing members of the Library Board of Trustees“ reads the Staff Report accompanying the Agenda (reproduced below).
While it is true that the community criticized the City Council for not asking the volunteer library support groups Friends of the Library or the Fullerton Library Foundation for their respective opinions on the idea of needlessly changing the Trustee appointment process, as far as we know, nobody ever asked for an alternative process in the first place, other than City Councilmemeber Jennifer Fitzgerald. On May 1 she unilaterally suggested that the City Council appoint themselves as Trustees and create what would essentially be a subservient and powerless Library Advisory Board. What the community did two weeks ago at the last City Council meeting was to roundly reject this idea the Council making themselves the Trustees when we said to just leave the Library Board alone. The community did not say to try to solve a problem that doesn’t exist by terminating a perfectly clear and functional process by which members of the City Council each appoint a Trustee from the community to serve as Trustees.
Like the last agenda two weeks ago, this one does not specify anywhere why any change at all to the Library Board appointment process is needed. As far as we can tell, it is just another solution–and probably a bad one–looking for a problem.
The Staff Report continues…“Such a process could include stakeholders in the Library to include the Friends of the Library, the Library Foundation, and local school districts. A panel of stakeholders could then make a recommendation to the City Council for appointment as Library Board of Trustee appointments become available.” One would hope that members of the City Council were already consulting with these groups when considering appointments to the Library Board, but if it must be codified that people who know a thing or two about the library ought to be listened to, then such an action seems harmless enough…
…unless, the whole thing is just cover for a majority of the City Council to control the Library Board outright. As it now stands, each Councilmember appoints a single Trustee to a five member Board. This arrangement ensures that the balance of the Library Board reflects the balance on the Council, which is as balanced as the electorate collectively sees fit to make it. If another process is adopted whereby the entire council must approve appointees recommended by the Library Foundation or Friends of the Library, a bare majority will be able to make all five appointments. This is not a strategy for making the Library Board more “independent,” as Mayor Doug Chaffee suggested during his attempted damage control at the last meeting.*
One possible method of adding informed voices to the Library Board would be to allow the Library Foundation and the Friends of the Library each an ex-officio seat on the Board, but allowing them to directly appoint members with voting power changes the way the library is governed, and any such change should be justified somewhere in an agenda report, but isn’t at this time. It’s still a mystery why this entire issue is being bought forth in the first place.
*And since when does Doug Chaffee care so much about a more independent Library Board? He objected to any member of the current Library Board serving on the 2018 Library Ad Hoc Committee, claiming they were too “biased” about what to do with the Hunt Branch. The 2012 Library Ad Hoc Committee included all five Trustees as members.
fullertonrag.com 