By David Scribner
July 5, 2011
When a political fray becomes nasty, petty, brutish and unkind – to rephrase Thomas Hobbes — the better part of valor, sometimes, is to withdraw gracefully from the field of battle.
That is the tact Great Barrington’s Director of Libraries Anne Just has taken, announcing her retirement as of August, in the wake of the dust-up between the new leadership of the Library Board of Trustees, bent on reasserting its authority over library personnel, and Town Manager Kevin O’Donnell whose post the charter designates as the supervisor of town departments, the library being one of them.
Karin Beebe, President of Library Board of Trustees at Selectmen's Meeting. Her husband, George Beebe, is seated nearby.
When Karin Beebe last month became president of the Board of Library Trustees – a rank that had before her ascension been called chairman – she informed the Board of Selectmen at a June 13 selectmen’s meeting that the Library Trustees intended to assume the authority for the hiring and firing of the library director.
In response, the selectmen reminded her that it would take a vote of the annual Town Meeting and an arduous review, plus an act of the state Legislature, to modify the town charter in order to resolve the differences between the Library Trustees’ charter and the town’s.
This matter could have been framed as an advocacy for an independent library system, a nonpartisan bastion of recorded wisdom governed by an elected board of trustees, insulated from the influences of town politics in order to protect the integrity of the library’s collection.
Unfortunately, such high-mindedness has not yet to become a factor in the discussion. So far, it is simply an argument about the exercise of power and who’s entitled to it, based upon an inconsistency between the library’s and the town’s charters. READ MORE >>
