Shortly before 8 p.m. on Dec. 27, Niles-Maine District Library Vice President Patti Rozanski placed a phone call to library attorney Dennis Walsh.
“Hello, Dennis, this is Patti Rozanski,” Rozanski said when Walsh’s phone went to voicemail. “We are having a rough go at our meeting and we are not able to agree; would you please call us? We are not planning on going anywhere until this is resolved.”
“This” was the temporary hiring freeze that’s been in place since May 2021, under which more than a third of library staff have departed and not been replaced.
The trustees were in the second hour of a special meeting called by newly appointed Trustee Umair Qadeer, and the deadlock that’s characterized most of the board’s operations since 2021 had descended once again.Tuesday night’s meeting ended with the hiring freeze still in place.
It has been a topic of major contention on the bitterly divided board, which was until earlier this month paralyzed in a 3-3 split between two factions of trustees, with Trustees Becky Keane, Diane Olson and Vice President Patti Rozanski diametrically opposed to the priorities of President Carolyn Drblik, Secretary Suzanne Schoenfeldt and Treasurer Joe Makula.
The latter faction spent much of the first portion of the meeting saying the library did not have enough information to take a vote on lifting the freeze while the former said the board should defer to Director Cyndi Rademacher’s requests to increase staffing levels.
“The library’s open 66 hours a week,” Makula said. “We’re not busy most of the time. There might be peaks and valleys as far as we’re busy. There’s no information here as far as what positions we need.”
Makula went on to say that he had not been able to obtain adequate information on staffing needs and what information he had was “grammar school level.”
“I got better information from the maintenance department than I got from people with master’s degrees,” he continued, referring to a recent maintenance department exercise in documenting their staff’s hours.
Olson told Makula this logic created a “circle of disgust.”
“I’m really tired of hearing ‘I need more information and nobody’s here,'” she said. “Well, nobody’s here because we can’t offer a program and we can’t offer a program if we don’t have the staff.”
The agenda posted in advance of the special meeting read “Hiring freeze discussion. Investigate and document specific tasks, services, and specific times that deficiencies may exist in relation to staff deployment.”
Drblik, backed by Makula and Schoenfeldt, argued that because the agenda called for a discussion as opposed to an action item, a motion by a majority of the board and subsequent vote on the hiring freeze would constitute a violation of the Illinois Open Meetings Act.
Keane had objected to the wording of the agenda earlier in the meeting.
“I’m not sure why we’re having a discussion about this when what we asked for was to have a vote,” she said. “We asked for an agenda that had action items on it so we could vote on this, not discuss it.”
Qadeer, backed by Keane, Rozanski and Olson, argued that they could take action on a subject related to an agenda item for which appropriate notice had been given according to the rules of the Open Meetings Act.
Rademacher advised the board that “the validity of any action taken by a public body which is germane to a subject on the agenda shall not be affected by other errors or omissions in the agenda.”
In other words, if a majority of the trustees wanted to take action on a subject listed on a properly noticed agenda, they are allowed to do so, she said.
Drblik disagreed with Rademacher on the grounds that it was a special meeting.
After significant back-and-forth among the trustees that saw Drblik insist that “this agenda does not call for a vote” and Qadeer declare he was not leaving the meeting until a vote was taken, the board members landed on contacting an attorney to help them understand the legality of calling a vote on an agenda item that was set out as a discussion.
When Walsh called back in response to Rozanski’s voicemail, Rademacher explained the situation to him: Qadeer had asked for a meeting to vote on the hiring freeze and ” then the agenda came out differently.”
“I don’t know how that happened,” Rademacher said.
“Carolyn is how it happened,” Rozanski said.
“Shut up,” Drblik shot back.
Walsh advised the board to not take final action on the item because it was listed as being for discussion.
But, he added, the four members of the board who wanted to vote on the hiring freeze have recourse available to them.
“If there are four board members that want a particular action to occur at a special board meeting, in my opinion there’s an obligation to have the agenda reflect that,” he said. “The remedy to the issue for the four board members is to simply call another board meeting and make sure the action items are on the agenda.”
The board ended its meeting shortly after hanging up with Walsh without discussion of when another meeting might be called. Qadeer informed Pioneer Press another special meeting would take place Dec. 30.