The Garfield County Public Library District Board of Trustees voted on Thursday to recommend Susan Use and Tony Hershey to the Garfield Board of County Commissioners (BOCC) for the vacant Glenwood Springs seat on the library’s governing body.
On Feb. 27, the BOCC interviewed Hershey and Use in addition to two other applicants — Ksana Ogelsby and Maureen Biermann — for the position. While the BOCC has the authority to make the final decision on who will ultimately fill the role, the library board was asked to rank the applicants and return a decision to the BOCC ahead of their March 10 meeting, when they were set to make a decision. See this week’s GarCo Report for details on the BOCC’s decision to go with Hershey.
Use, who previously held the seat for four years until December, received three votes from library board members. Hershey, a local attorney and former Glenwood Springs City Council member, received two.
Board members John Mallonee and Michelle Foster along with board president Adrian Rippy-Sheehy cast their votes for Use, while board members Myrna Fletchall and Stephanie Pierucci Hirsch voted for Hershey. Board member Brit McLin was excused and absent from the vote.
“I think that Susan was an excellent board member,” Mallonee said, adding that he believed her experience would serve the library well going forward.
Fletchall disagreed, saying that Use’s previous role on the board was a reason not to reappoint her, while Hershey’s fresh perspective was a better option.
“I feel that sometimes Susan gets influenced on her decision, even if the situation is pretty black and white,” Fletchall said. “I think that that history she has with the board for this many years is not beneficial to the drama that we’re trying to move away from. We’re trying to be proactive, we’re trying to make the library move forward.”
On the other hand, she said that Hershey has no history on the library board that would make him biased one way or another. “He has knowledge with other boards, he has experience with other boards and he has experience as a lawyer, and I think that that will be beneficial,” she said.
The BOCC’s request for the board to rank the four candidates led to some confusion. Ultimately, although board members expressed support for either Ogelsby or Biermann as second preferences behind Hershey and Use, they decided only to recommend Hershey and Use as their top two choices with the 3-2 vote standing.
Later in the meeting, the board discussed operations and governance protocols and continued past conversations about wages and compensation, including the compensation of the library’s executive director, Jamie LaRue. LaRue asked the board to discuss what an appropriate level of that focus might look like, because he said that in recent months it’s begun to feel like board members are too concerned about operations when, according to Colorado state statute, the board is responsible for overseeing things like the library’s budget, but not for going through and checking each invoice.
LaRue said that throughout this discussion, Fletchall continued asking the staff at consecutive meetings for more comparative data about compensation. LaRue said that it began to feel like she was crossing a line.
“We gave you, position by position — here’s the range, this was the source of the data — and so at some point it’s like, happy to answer questions, but not new questions each time,” LaRue said.
Fletchall argued that as a member of the compensation committee she was deserving of seeing specific information, such as data comparing library staff’s compensation to wages at other libraries and similar organizations in the region. She said she wondered why LaRue was withholding that information from her and earned applause from the room when she said she felt that LaRue was denying her access to it.
In a brief back-and-forth, Rippy-Sheehy said that she had been under the impression that LaRue gave Fletchall the information she requested, only for Fletchall to then express that that was not the information that she had wanted to see. Fletchall maintained that she had been asking for the same information all along and never got it.
Mallonee said that he agreed that trustees should have access to any information regarding finances and that to his knowledge, that information is fully under the purview of trustees. He made a motion to establish a retreat once the vacant trustee seat is filled for board members and library management to strengthen their relationships and get to know each other. He also made a second motion for an optional work session for the requested information about compensation comparisons to be explained to the trustees. Both motions passed unanimously.
“I think we’re all in the same place, like — it’s tense,” Rippy-Sheehy said during the vote. “And we’re neighbors and we want to kind of get along, and let’s just set some time aside.”