Opinion: Library Board Resignations

The Columbia County Library Advisory Board’s regional representatives had such courage of conviction with their “yes” votes on the regional board meeting on 12/10/2024 for the new age-based guidelines, that three out of the five people who voted for it have since resigned. Tripp Calloway announced that he didn’t want to be reappointed to the board over the summer because I guess he felt uncomfortable with the tensions between the board and staff. However, it didn’t stop him from voting yes. Of course, he works for Commissioner Carraway so that’s a tough spot to be in. Bill Speer submitted an email with his resignation on 12/27. Lindsey Brantley told (now) Vice Chairman Couch a week before the vote that she would resign after the vote. I’ve attached her letter.

In this letter, Brantley claims that she did not intend for these guidelines to be voted on yet. I’m paraphrasing but she felt like this was a draft and that the commissioners would send it back for feedback. She also claims that she expressed concern about passing guidelines as written and that it might not “go well” if “staff was tasked with enforcing such guidelines.” That seems obvious. You would think if she were that concerned though, she would have sent the Regional Director an email about it.

Then she claims that she was often confused by the board’s role. Well, yeah, that’s because the Advisory Board was always going outside of their originally intended role once it included changing policy over operations. When you start stepping out of your lane, things tend to get dicey. I know I know…. Oh you were just an Advisory Board and just making recommendations to the librarians. The problem with that is that in the next breath, this board would turn around and use the power of the commissioners to enforce whatever the board wanted, because the commissioners wanted that as well. Then conveniently, when it didn’t go right or it required more work from the advisory board then they wanted to do (since they are “volunteers”), the library staff gets thrown under the bus. Lindsey later claims (I’m paraphrasing) there was a quick vote by the board, Mary Lin sent an email shortly after stating that books being reconsidered had already been re-shelved, and she felt things were already “out of control.”

Through Open Records Requests though - Lindsey Brantley and Sandra Carraway started further rewriting the collection policy. I’ve included email traffic from 9/16/2024 and 9/18/2024, along with the attached documents (Lindsey’s proposed policy and Dr. Carraway’s revisions.) The emails included Lindsey Brantley, Dr. Carraway, Vice Chairman Alison Couch, John Luton and Glen Kennedy. Who was missing? Mary Lin Maner, our former Regional Director and Library Manager.

“Faux books” to hide the empty shelves?

Dr. Carraway nixed the “faux books” idea.

Lindsey felt it was so “out of control” that she was still writing policy without Mary Lin’s input two weeks after the guidelines were passed by the commissioners? It looks like to me, regardless of what she claims in her resignation letter, she finally had all the control she wanted. At the end of the day though, even if she felt it was “out of control”, she still voted “yes” to pass the guidelines. Now, she just seems to want to avoid responsibility for the mess that she made.