BRATTLEBORO — Fair warning: This column is long. And complicated. And more than a little bizarre.
What follows is meticulous documentation of flagrant breaking of Vermont law. The events I describe - over meeting minutes and an accompanying public statement by a board chair - simply did not need to happen.
And it's time for this pattern of behavior by the leadership of the Rockingham Free Public Library Board of Trustees to stop. Here and now.
So go grab a coffee and strap in. It's going to be a wild ride.
* * *
Our story starts last Friday, when Janice Mitchell-Love, the chair of the board of trustees of the Rockingham Free Public Library, offered a submission to this Voices section, which I was very glad to receive the next day.
Mitchell-Love has been no fan of The Commons and our reporting about the behavior and decisions of her board, yet has declined multiple opportunities to comment for our news pages. I have invited her several times to contribute something. And despite everything that follows, I remain glad that the piece is in our pages and that she is happy with the very minor editing I did.
When she emailed the submission on Saturday, Mitchell-Love caught me off guard.
She wrote that the document would also satisfy a public-records request from Allison Teague, our reporter who has been covering this story thoroughly for almost a year.
Teague, in what was routine research for her reporting, had asked for a copy of a statement from which Mitchell-Love had read at the Feb. 11 trustees' meeting, a statement that the chair had also specified to be entered into the record.
But in the same email to me, Mitchell-Love also made clear that she was submitting this public document for publication only under the condition that I not share it with Teague. “I do not welcome her lack of journalistic ethics and ability,” she wrote.
I replied that if she was submitting the document as a public record, I couldn't not share it with my reporter - the same reporter who made the public records request for the same document in the first place.
Mitchell-Love replied that, in fact, it was not actually the same document that she read, and that she would deal with fulfilling Teague's public records request separately and “appropriately.” She further insisted that if I couldn't comply with her wish that the document not be shared with my colleague, she would rescind her permission to publish it.
Though somewhat puzzled, I agreed to that condition.
But I wondered: why would the chair have brought up Teague's records request in the first place? And if this piece had been written for publication, as she originally told me, then why would she have ended it with, “Thanks for listening”?
So I fired up FACT-TV (fact8.com) and watched the video of the Feb. 11 meeting.
As I promised Mitchell-Love, I did not share that document with Teague, and I remain happy to publish the chair's piece on page C1 of this week's paper under the original terms of our agreement.
But that doesn't mean that my reporter didn't know its contents all along, and that's only the beginning of this odd situation's surreal escalation.
1. I confirmed that the document as submitted was, in fact, fundamentally identical to the one that Mitchell-Love read at the public meeting. (Compared to the 1,777 words in the PDF, 49 words were deleted and 18 added.) And a second copy of the document - with “copyright 2014 J. Mitchell-Love, all rights reserved” splashed across each page - was submitted at the same time, and it was exactly what she read.
2. Mitchell-Love “handle[d] the [public records request] appropriately” by writing to Teague and telling her that she was having “problems accessing the document in question.”
Minutes before, she sent me the very document that my reporter had requested.
3. Teague also formally requested the routine minutes of the meeting. On Monday, at 11:53 a.m., Mitchell-Love wrote Teague and said there would be a delay in distributing them.
“Your request brings up an interesting point that I raised with our [state] representatives,” Mitchell-Love replied. “Five days is a bit short of a turnaround time for volunteers to get minutes out. This particular past five days has contained several snow days and a long holiday weekend, which has made it even more difficult for everyone to get minutes drafted, edited, stamped as 'draft,' and out. And, since the library is closed until Tuesday, I am unsure when they will be sent out to the public.”
According to a screen capture provided by a member of the library staff, both the minutes and Mitchell-Love's statement were distributed to trustees and staff at 11:47 a.m., six minutes before the chair wrote Teague to inform her of the delay.
“I understand that there is some interest in the legislature in lengthening this deadline,” Deputy Secretary of State Brian Leven advised us. “However, until such a change is duly enacted, minutes must be made available after five days.”
4. “When you do get the minutes, you'll note that the letter I read to the trustees which is attached is also copyrighted,” Mitchell-Love wrote to Teague. “And you do not have permission to use any of it nor does anyone you might give it to.”
On Tuesday, Leven said Mitchell-Love couldn't assert ownership of this statement.
“If it is [read openly], then it's public, and I don't think there's any sort of way to claim exemption to it,” he said.
So what does all of this mean?
We're dealing with a situation where we have proof - twice - that unambiguously public documents are ready and available for public consumption as required by Vermont law, yet an email trail shows that the chair has twice gone out of her way to deliberately withhold them from a reporter under false pretenses. And one of these documents is exactly what was submitted for publication here.
Frankly, the whole thing leaves my head spinning. I can sum up this current situation with only one term - a highly technical, academic term used by generations of newspaper editors for this sort of contemptuous behavior by public officials.
This is bullshit.
* * *
Here's the thing: I just don't understand why Mitchell-Love would approach us and ask to run a statement defending her and the board's actions with regard to openness and transparency, yet subsequently behave in ways that only serve to illustrate - exactly - what her critics have been saying for months.
I also don't understand why the chair would so vehemently try to keep one reporter from accessing a document, when that same reporter had already viewed the meeting at which it was read (available online for anyone to see, thanks to the volunteers at FACT) and who already knew its existence and its contents and referenced the same in her formal request.
And let's pause a moment and savor the irony of the fact that information withheld is about a library. A library. A place that exists for no other reason than openness, transparency, and access to information.
Look: Reasonable people can disagree about governance, decisions, and process, and that's fine. That's part of living in small towns and part of working with one another on volunteer boards.
Reasonable people can disagree about the press and the way that we approach the way we report, write, and edit the news. That's a healthy part of the process, too, and one that we embrace in the spirit of trying to do our jobs better and trying to serve the community.
But in looking at the whole situation at the Rockingham Free Public Library in general, I see it full of paradoxes, gross ignorance of basic sunshine laws, and just some markedly different interpretations of reality. Either I'm crazy, or some people involved in this issue are living in Bizarro Bellows Falls, where up is down, black is white, and the attorney general's not being able to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that laws were intentionally violated is the same as being officially absolved of breaking the law because the violations were determined to be unintentional.
Which, to be fair, means that the distance between these two views is the same, and these trustees see me and my colleagues as equally and oppositely wrong. And to be fair (too fair, according to some people I respect), I've concluded that all on this board, no matter where they stand on the contentious issues, genuinely believe they are acting in the library's best interest. I hope we can at the very least agree on that assertion, or at least accept the possibility of good intentions.
But I've also watched the bare majority of this board turn on Célina Houlné, a librarian who in my judgment offered candid, measured, conciliatory, professional, and eminently reasonable responses to criticism that seemed obviously designed to set her up to fail.
I've kept an open mind to statements from board leaders like, “If you knew what we knew, you'd fire her, too,” expecting smoking guns. Instead, I saw Houlné garner overwhelming support from her colleagues during an appeal of her firing, which she didn't have to make public - but did anyway, because she had nothing to hide - and then see her firing upheld by the same five trustees.
As I've surveyed this issue, I've paid special attention to statements by library staff, who were so upset at their boss's escalating mistreatment by her board that they came to speak out at a trustees' meeting last spring.
Is Houlné a perfect library director? Of course not. Houlné herself, in her response to her evaluation, was measured, realistic, and forthright about areas of growth, development, and improvement - all within the context of her overall response to the document, which paints her as a scheming, barely competent, and corrupt liar.
(Seriously, this evaluation offers a caricature of the world's worst employee, not a highly respected library director who heretofore had successfully run what more than once I've heard called the best library in Vermont. The only thing missing in the official evaluation was a photograph of the former director tenting her fingers and saying, “Mua-ha-ha-ha.”)
If Houlné were remotely as incompetent, unprofessional, and malicious as her evaluation professed, her staff would certainly have let us know. The public would have said something. We would have seen some context, somewhere, in which this board's treatment of this employee would be credible.
For almost a year, I've given this board's leadership the benefit of the doubt and have been concerned that I've been missing some critical fact that could explain their point of view and their behavior.
I'm no longer concerned.
* * *
In watching the Feb. 11 meeting, I was also profoundly struck by outgoing trustee Laura Senes and her parting words.
Senes, who voted twice to fire Houlné, described the ordeal of serving as an RFPL trustee as one of the worst experiences of her life, an experience that she said has discouraged her from ever offering to volunteer for any board in the future.
“It's opinion,” she said, demonstrably upset at the heat that the board has taken from the public over Houlné's dismissal. In part, she blamed the press for inciting public discontent.
Maybe she thinks that reducing this issue to a matter of differing “opinion” puts the merits of her votes on equal footing with those who voted differently from her. Sorry. It doesn't.
Notably absent in all that discussion about civility was the point that trustees have smeared a loyal employee's professional reputation and disrupted her livelihood. They routinely accuse the press of unprofessionalism, malice, and incompetence, and they email bullying threats of public censure and lawsuits for simply reporting this nonsense.
On Jan. 10, Vice-Chair Deb Wright, also upset with our reporting, wrote: “As you continue to allow [trustee] Elayne Clift and her ilk to use your paper, your staff and your reporters as her instrument of choice to bludgeon the RFPL board of trustees at will, perhaps the libel suit I am filing with the Windham Superior Court will shed some much needed light on this subject.”
Wright, by the way, earlier tried to file a public records request with The Commons demanding all emails, incoming and outgoing, from Teague about the RFPL. (My response, in its entirety: “The public records law applies to government entities, not to the media.” Really? I have to tell that to an elected official?)
So I hope Senes' seat is filled by someone who makes sounder decisions and who has the strength to defend those decisions from legitimate public dissent.
And however the election on March 4 turns out, I hope the reconstituted board of trustees will address the issues they confront - the resolution of Houlné's lawsuit, the final disposition of the building-cost overruns, and a general process of healing and reconciliation with staff and the community at large - with clarity, with equanimity, with mutual respect, with compassion, with intelligence, with integrity, with professionalism, and with complete transparency.
There's a long, long way to go.