Library Chief Stepping Down; Task Force Updates County Board
After a bruising budget year for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Public Library that saw branch closings, reduced operating hours, and scores of layoffs, library chief Charles Brown is checking out after seven years at the helm. He announced his retirement this week, effective June 30 at the end of the fiscal year.
Until then Brown will continue working at 80 percent of his current annual salary of nearly $180,000. At the same time, the library system will be bringing Vick Phillips, a former Bank of America executive, on board as interim CEO at a salary of $13,000 a month.
So the supposedly cash-strapped library system, which was so stone-broke it absolutely had to pinkslip hundreds of frontline workers, will now be paying lucrative salaries for not one, but two top executives.
Through consolidation of some services and axing another existing lower-level executive position, library officials claim they can afford to have two top chiefs without any additional expense.
Meanwhile, the vaunted Future of the Library Task Force, which is funded to the tune of $225,000, unveiled some of its preliminary recommendations at this week’s board of commissioners meeting. The 17-member task force’s final report is due out in March.
“We’re beginning to reach consensus on items of importance, but not necessarily core importance,” Task Force Chairman Jim Woodward told commissioners.
Some of the consensus reached so far: Moving forward the library will need to recruit more volunteers and solicit more private donations, Woodward said.
In other words, the $225,000 task force is recommending the library system find free labor and more money.
On the volunteer front, Woodward said, the library could probably not realistically expect to be able to recruit and retain gratis labor to fill more than 5 percent of its staffing needs for basic services. As for private fundraising, the task force is likely to peg an annual goal of about $1 million.
Somewhere down the line, Woodward said, the library might have to consider coming full into the county’s fold to achieve cost savings through consolidating services.
As it stands, those consolidations, done internally through merging some departments, would only save about $290,000 a year, the task force reported earlier this year.
Other possible recommendations coming down the pike from the task force include moving more libraries to a digital-based delivery system, and possibly restructuring the costly ImaginOn facility.
For the immediate future, though, it looks like the library system is still reading from the same book of finding more money to solve its problems.
In addition to unveiling the task force’s preliminary recommendations of rounding up more volunteers and fundraising more loot, Library Board of Trustees Chairman Robin Branstrom was also hinting around for more funding from the county.
While Branstrom in one breath told commissioners that she understood the county faced “unprecedented” economic challenges, in the next breath she urged commissioners to rank libraries as a higher priority up the funding chain.
“I know you all share our goal, which is to deliver the best possible library experience to our community with the resource we all have available to us,” Branstrom said.
Specifically, Branstrom said the county should consider providing additional funding to restore full service at libraries in “fragile” neighborhoods. Some of those branches, like others, have seen their operating hours cut some 50 percent.
Part and parcel of losing nearly $10 million in funding from the county this year, the library system has reduced operating hours at branch locations from 75 hours per week to 32 to 38 hours per week, Woodward told commissioners.
“We do not believe that is a sustainable structure, as far as operating is concerned,” Woodward said.
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