Letter to the Editor: "It's All About The Money"

To the Editor,

There are a number of factual errors in that require correcting. Also assertions that bear examining.

First and indisputably, there are 8 Library Trustees, not 7. I am the senior Library Trustee (serving since March 2008) and was alone among the 8 in voting against the Nov. 14 reduction of Library Director Laura Eckley’s Oct. 12 salary increase.

This letter is from me as a citizen and should not be identified or construed as “Library Board-approved.” I continue to serve faithfully as a Trustee of the Bronxville Public Library and with resolute obedience to my Oath of Office. I will not, however, submit to peer pressure nor to attempts by Village Hall (most aggressively on Oct. 31) to silence me on a matter of great importance to Bronxville citizens and taxpayers.

If the Mayor believes she was denied “our day in court” by Ms. Eckley’s having withdrawn the Article 78 proceeding “the day prior to our filing deadline,” Her Honor’s own lawyer, James Staudt, delayed that “day in court” by demanding — and receiving — a two-week extension on the Mayor’s filing.

Her Honor identifies herself as “a proud graduate of an all-women's college” — from which we are to infer, I presume, that Her Honor is to be automatically accorded the status of “feminist.” Not a single woman heads a department at Village Hall, unless Julie Cagliostro is a department of one. Certainly, Ms. Cagliostro is not listed in the Village’s official directory as a department head.

The Library’s Director is also not a department head. That person — as of Feb. 4 it will no longer be Ms. Eckley — reports to an independent governing body, the Library Board. And it is here that the real trouble resides, in the very serious matter of the Library’s independent governance.

I fear that as this unhappy event continues to play out in the press, as the Mayor has insisted on doing by devoting an entire column to it, Bronxville will come under increasing scrutiny and ridicule by neighboring communities — and beyond.

Because it is difficult to find the evidence of the Bronxville Public Library’s genuine independence from Village Authority. The fact that the Mayor and Village Administrator Harold Porr met privately with Library Board president Kathleen Mullen and Library Board secretary Rosanne Welshimer on Oct. 18 (Village Treasurer Robert Fels was also present) speaks to the magnitude of this problem.

That meeting was never authorized by the Library Board in full assembly, as is required by law. The details of that meeting, except for a single document in Mr. Fels’s hand, have been kept secret. Ms. Mullen and Ms. Welshimer went straight from that meeting to Ms. Eckley’s office to inform her that her new salary would need to be reviewed in a special meeting of the Library Board. Ms. Mullen and Ms. Welshimer separately emailed Ms. Eckley on Oct. 26 to say that she had “misunderstood” their Oct. 18 visit and that her new salary was NOT in jeopardy. But it was indeed in jeopardy, as the special meeting of the Library Board on Nov. 14 established.

The Mayor makes this misstatement of the facts of the Library Board’s unanimous Oct. 12 vote to raise the Director’s salary: “When complete financial information was later presented to the Library Board, it became clear that they did not have sufficient money without cutting and reducing other line items in the budget to fund the raise.” Untrue and insulting — because the Mayor is essentially accusing the Library Board of being ignorant of its own budget. We were NOT.

Here’s what REALLY happened. On Sept. 29, the Library Board’s personnel committee, of which I am a member, met to discuss staff salaries. On Oct. 7, the committee voted unanimously to present Trustee Karen Falk’s recommendation that the Board resolve to increase Ms. Eckley’s annual salary to $100K — a salary consistent with that of library directors of Ms. Eckley’s seniority in neighboring communities. On Oct. 12, the Library Board passed the resolution — unanimously.

The Mayor asserts that the “Library Finance Chairman” [sic] — Ms. Welshimer — was unaware of the personnel committee’s work. This is untrue. Ms. Mullen attested at both personnel committee meetings that she was “discussing with Rosanne how to make the numbers work.” Further, a Sept. 30 email from Ms. Falk to Ms. Welshimer establishes the fact of detailed communication between the committees.

It is untrue, as the Mayor claims, that Ms. Welshimer was “denied the opportunity,” by me, to address the Oct. 12 meeting from Florida via speakerphone. Library Board President Mullen, an attorney, made the decision not to contact Ms. Welshimer after I directed Ms. Mullen’s attention to a section of NYS Public Officers Law and to a related advisory that such communication would be “inconsistent with law.”

Regardless, what “complete financial information” was possessed by Ms. Welshimer on Oct. 12, and that the rest of us lacked? None. There was no confusion by the Library Board as to the implications of the vote to increase the Director’s salary. Library Trustees were admirably articulate on the importance of advocating for the public funding necessary to cover Library services, including the appropriate compensation of the Director.

This advocacy by the Library Trustees happens every year under the same circumstances that the police chief and the heads of DPW, Buildings, and other departments, make their respective claims on the Village budget. The money need not have been “found,” as the Mayor asserts, “by trimming hours of operation or book budgets,” but by the Library Trustees doing their jobs by presenting a Library budget consistent with what Bronxville taxpayers rightly expect of their Library.

And here is the biggest problem. A gigantic embarrassment for Bronxville. I have been a party to it, and I record here my sense of shame and dismay in having participated. For years, the Library Board has returned tens of thousands of dollars to Village Administration — $98,000 since 2005. This just is not done by library boards in neighboring communities.

The result has been that, each year, we’ve had to “beg it back.” This is not good “stewardship of our tax dollars,” as the Mayor describes it, but the explicit abdication by the Library Board of its Chartered authority to Village Administration.

Just because this has been consistent practice — $16K went from the Library back to the Village last year; $19K the year before that — does not make that practice right or, very likely, even legal.

Yes, it has come to this: a need to examine New York State Library Law, to find out whether or not the Village can apply the pressure it has applied to Library Trustees (myself included, during my 18 months as Library Board president). Mr. Staudt, who at present represents both the Library and the Village of Bronxville, is most certainly not the attorney for this job.

Were it that the Mayor practiced her preachment. It is the Mayor’s “regular custom to sit in on meetings with the Village Administrator when I am in Village Hall” — but Oct. 18 was one meeting that Her Honor, by Her Honor’s own words, well knew should not have been permitted to even occur. A responsible chief executive would have disbanded the meeting, not “sat in” on it.

Despite Her Honor’s insistence otherwise, the Mayor’s perception of her “reputation” is not the issue here, but Her Honor certainly does nothing for it by perpetuating distortions and untruths as to what has really been going on at the Library and at Village Hall — not just during the folly that lost Bronxville an outstanding Library Director to Larchmont, but for many years prior. It’s all about the money. Let’s look into it.

Sean Abbott

Bronxville Citizen