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Library Board officially ends Bookmobile
A small crowd of citizens gathered at the Putnam County Public Library Board meeting Wednesday evening, many of them hoping to voice their opinions about the pending decision to discontinue Bookmobile service in Putnam County after more than 50 years.
What they found, however, was a decision had been made before the public had a chance to speak.
An end to Bookmobile service, effective Monday, March 2, was first announced to the public at bannergraphic.com on Tuesday, Feb. 10 and then in the next day's print edition of the Banner Graphic.
In the article, Library Director Grier Carson gave the reasons for needing to discontinue Bookmobile service and replace it with a different sort of materials delivery service. Chief among these were financial constraints and the overall efficiency of the process.
Prefacing the board's vote on the matter Wednesday, Carson restated some of these concerns.
"As a single branch library serving a diverse and somewhat geographically disparate community of users, we recognize the importance of materials delivery for our remote patrons," Carson began. "We also recognize the value in partnering with community organizations to provide convenient drop off/pick up locations in lieu of door-to-door delivery service for library patrons.
"The bookmobile itself has long served this purpose," he continued, "bringing materials and in some respects the face of the library to remote patrons; however, after much deliberation, we have reached the conclusion that the current model for this program is no longer feasible from an operational and budgetary standpoint."
Carson then officially stated that the library was discontinuing the Bookmobile.
"We are therefore retiring the Bookmobile itself as well as making some adjustments to the model we use for materials delivery," Carson said.
A few minutes after Carson's statement, the Library Board put the matter to a vote, passing a resolution to discontinue the Bookmobile and replace it with a materials delivery program by a 5-0 count.
The board's next move -- also with very little discussion -- was to eliminate the Bookmobile librarian position, thus ending Jane Glier's tenure with the library. This also passed 5-0.
A couple of things were curious about the votes, as members of the audience pointed out at meeting's end.
First of all, Carson made an announcement about ending the Bookmobile several weeks before Thursday's meeting, yet nowhere in his statements did he say the board was considering the move. He said simply that the Bookmobile would be ending.
Likewise, his statement prior to the vote that "we are therefore retiring the Bookmobile itself" did not seem to leave any decision up to the board, even though any such move is not official until the vote.
The second curious matter about the vote was that comments from the audience -- full of people clearly wanting to talk about the Bookmobile decision -- were not accepted until the meeting's end, after the official decision.
More than one attendee took the board up on these matters of procedure and possible violations of the Indiana Open Door Law.
"I just don't understand how you can make a decision without community input," Tammy Hunter said. "It doesn't seem right that it's a done deal when tonight you just voted on it."
Vicki Timm, a long-serving former Library Board member attending as a citizen, raised a number of concerns with how the board conducts business.
"I'm very concerned, not only about the Bookmobile itself, but about the meeting tonight," Timm said.
With that, she expressed concern over the way board minutes are recording and some troubling inconsistencies within those minutes, such as there being no evidence of the board actually approving financial statements at some meetings. Timm said this would be a red flag for the State Board of Accounts should the library be audited.
Timm also expressed concern that the only previous mention of ending the Bookmobile that she could find was in the minutes of an Aug. 9, 2014 board retreat, one that took place at the lake house of board member Diana LaViolette.
While board retreats are open meetings and the public is welcome to attend, the different time, date, location and length of retreats make them prohibitive to public attendance or press coverage.
These factors give discussion of controversial subjects at a retreat the appearance of secrecy, whether intended or not.
"It may not violate the letter of the law," Timm said, "but I don't think it meets the spirit of the Open Door Law."
The minutes of the Aug. 9 meeting reveal that no official action was taken, instead that "the board consensus was to decommission the bookmobile when appropriate and explore a more affordable means to provide meaningful and effective outreach to the community."
Other audience members spoke more specifically about the decision rather than the way it was made.
"The Bookmobile is now gone from the nursing homes and senior citizen centers," Marianne Novak said. "These people relied upon Jane to bring them books, magazines and other resources just as the children did. They too benefited from Jane's expertise in helping them choose a book to read because she got to know them and what they liked by showing up in the mobile library every week."
Novak continued by saying that these people do not have computer skills or service and are therefore unlikely to take advantage of the ability to choose a book online and have it delivered.
She then gave a list of local child and elderly care organizations, as well as community stops, saying that the Bookmobile not making these 30 or so stops would affect hundreds of people in the county.
Sally Brown expressed her concern over Glier's loss of a job and how many people had asked her to speak out on the Bookmobile librarian's behalf.
"They asked me to come and make sure you know how much the appreciated her (Glier) -- the things she did that she didn't have to, on her own time."
Likewise, Timm said she was concerned that in eliminating the Bookmobile librarian and the network administrator (unrelated, but also voted upon Wednesday), the library lost its longest-tenured employee in Glier and another long-time employee in George Edenfield.
Brown continued her statement by saying that if the Bookmobile has to go, she hopes the library and its proposed outreach service will continue to serve the children, the elderly and the developmentally disabled.
"I would like to see something done for these people," Brown said, suggesting perhaps a library room in some of the smaller communities and even offering to volunteer. "This is a core group of people that we can't forget."
What comes next is the big question now for the board, an issue that Carson also discussed.
The library will need to find a more reliable and cost-effective vehicle for the delivery service, "able to get out to more stops consistently and under numerous weather conditions."
Carson added that besides a vehicle, there is the question of "how?"
"This will also involve some consideration as to how we can best serve each area of the county with this new model," Carson said, "whether it be small browsing collections housed in partnering community centers or streamlined materials delivery stops at schools.
"The goal here is to make our program more flexible."
He also announced the intention to work with community members on what the next solution is.
"In the coming weeks, we'll be working with our partnering community stops on a new schedule, gathering some details about patron needs and the workflow we expect staff to adopt," Carson said.
And while the board made few statements about the Bookmobile issue, Board President Nancy Zennie did conclude the meeting with a little bit of insight into the decision.
"It (the Bookmobile) has been a white elephant in the room for a long time. It has been extremely costly to maintain."