To the Editor:
I gave public comment at two May 16 sessions of the Guilderland Public Library Board of Trustees meeting. The first session focused on general mismanagement; the second on the Café con Mel.

The library used to livestream the meetings but over the past few months, has recorded them, then uploaded to its YouTube channel.

I suspect what I outlined are many of the same questions journalist Ted Gup was asking, ultimately leading to his resignation from the board.

Here is what I said to the board:

As you know, I served as Public Information Officer at Guilderland Public Library for five years and three months from January 2019 to April 2024, including the 2019 referendum vote, construction project and COVID concurrently during 2020-2021, and the café.

I worked very hard and did not enjoy a vacation in those five-plus years without bringing my laptop along to fit in some work tasks. I repeatedly requested part-time help.

The eventual response was to bring in an administrative assistant at the same salary as me to help with graphics and social media — about $18,000 more than the previous administrative assistant, and a clear lack of salary equity with existing employees such as myself.

I was not informed prior to the job posting, and was surprised to see these elements added. The disrespect was apparent. 

It is clear that public relations duties are not valued by the current administration, also evidenced by comments made at last month’s board meeting.

This is a mistake. The library needs an experienced marketing professional who is devoted to regular communications, including weekly eNews, monthly newsletters, engaging and varied social media presence, weekly press releases, consistent branding, graphics management, and ongoing community relations activities, among other duties.

This cannot be adequately fulfilled by an administrative assistant, whose main duties revolve around supporting important administrative and board functions. It does a disservice to both the administrative-assistant and the public-information-officer positions to think that they can be lumped together into one role, which you may already be discovering. 

This leads to other unanswered questions:

— Reorganization plan

Back in December 2023, the board asked for a presentation of the “reorganization plan” — did you ever get it? No. Neither did the staff. So the assumption for the reorg plan is: Get rid of current staff, and hire new staff at a higher rate. It happens over and over again, and is patently unfair to existing staff. And you wonder why morale is low;

— Safety plan

Did you know that, to date, the library has no safety plan? Back in April 2022, I provided a template from another library for GPL to customize. A safety committee was formed, but no one took the lead. So the committee was disbanded, along with weekly department-head meetings.

Discussion was shut down, and anyone who questioned anything — however legitimate the concern — was deemed a troublemaker. Where are clear procedures outlined on what to do in an emergency? Shouldn’t this be top priority? And you wonder why morale is low;

— Work-from-home policy

The library currently has no work-from-home policy. So not only is there no safety plan, there is no clear delineation of who’s in charge on any given day, should an emergency occur. GPL is a school-district library, but it certainly doesn’t operate like a school, where administrators are always on site.

I recall the board requesting that at least one administrator be present in the building on weekdays. Yet administrators in charge routinely work from home. Furthermore, how can someone overseeing customer service justify working from home? And you wonder why morale is low;

— Hiring policies

A better system for attracting new employees, plus consistent onboarding and offboarding procedures, needs to be adopted. Case in point: For the newly-created HR position, only two candidates were interviewed. One was hired who did not possess an HR degree, only a “certificate.”

Clearly, she was not qualified, yet was inexplicably granted a $20,000 raise from $60,000 to $80,000 after only a few months, significantly more than what other area libraries pay for an HR supervisor with a degree. I brought a legitimate employee concern to her in July 2023, with zero follow-up. She left abruptly in February 2024 …. These are just a few examples of why morale is low.

Hopefully, the new director will make safety, transparency, communication, accountability at all levels, and salary equity top priorities.

Luanne Nicholson

Latham

Editor’s note: No video recording of the May 16 trustees meeting has been posted to the Guilderland Public Library’s website. See related story.

A second related story details the library’s interim director’s response to some of the concern’s Luanne Nicholson raised with the board and in this letter.