Staff Alert! Posted November 25, 2003
EEO Questionnaire Promises Anonymity
But Asks for Identifying Information
On November 22, library employees began receiving at their homes
questionnaires mailed to them by the law firm the AFPL board has hired
to conduct an "independent investigation" into widespread violations
by library administrators of federal Equal Employment Opportunity laws
and Fulton County personnel policies and procedures.
The 27-page questionnaire states that the investigators will protect
the anonymity of the people responding to the questionnaire, but the
first set of questions on the form ask for information that, if
divulged to library administrators (or board members), could easily
identify many individuals.
Given the record of vindictive personnel actions visited upon library
employees critical of the current administrative regime at AFPL,
AFPLWATCH cautions employees responding to the questionnaire to omit
any information--such as one's work site--that could, combined with
other identifying characteristics recorded on the form, easily identify
them, but to respond as completely as possible to the other questions
on the form, and to return the form even if they cannot complete and
mail it by the stated deadline.
Because the investigator is being paid by the library's board of
trustees, it is possible that the board will hesitate to make public the
investigator's findings unless obliged to do so as a result of an Open
Records Act. On the other hand, if too few employees respond to the
"climate survey," this fact may be used to bolster the notion that no
EEO violations have occurred, or that the perception that violations
have occurred is not widespread. So it's important that employees
respond to the survey, but do so without jeopardizing themselves.
Employees might also consider writing onto the form a statement
emphasizing how important it is that a complete summary of the
investigator's findings be promptly made available to library
employees.
December 4, 2003 Update: The independent
investigator notified APPL's Human Resources Manager that it is still
not too late for employees to to send in their completed questionnaires,
or to ask for a survey if they did not receive one.
And the 2003 "Head-in-the-Sand Award" goes to... Posted November 24, 2003
"[AFPL Board Chair Annette] Steed said that Hooker earlier this year
received a positive job evaluation, based on her 'overall job
performance.' She said the lawsuit ‘had no bearing’ on the evaluation
‘because it doesn't have direct bearing on her day-to-day performance.’
Asked if the lawsuit affected how the staff and public perceive
Hooker, Steed said, ‘We work very closely with our director. If we
take into consideration disparate points of view coming from different
directions, we wouldn't be fair to her.’"
Library Journal, November 15, 2003, page 18
"The Case of the Faltering Filters"
Posted November 22, 2003
Hooker has mentioned in several arenas lately that AFPL may have to
go out and purchase another Internet filtering software package due
to the myriad problems the current filter (supplied by the Georgia
Public Library Services office) is causing library users.
Had Hooker consulted the people in the organization most familiar with
Internet filtering products before impulsively forging ahead with a
cost-cutting alliance with her friend "Lamar" at GPLS, we'd still be
using a filter fraught with fewer problems. But consulting with
knowledgeable colleagues is not The Hooker Way. In approaching
virtually any library management issue, Hooker's m.o. is to:
- pointedly ignore the data and resources--especially the human
resources--at hand.
- trumpet the advantages of doing things differently (no matter
how unresearched or ill-advised or impractical), so she can claim
she's doing something to earn her big salary.
- let frustrated patrons express what the library staff would
have warned her about had she asked
- reverse whatever decision she's made and return to the status
quo
As members of AFPL's chronically-ignored Electronic
Resources Advisory Committee already know (although Hooker apparently
doesn't--or simply doesn't care), there is a wealth of available data
comparing the various Internet filtering products on the market. The
latest study, like most previous ones, is available
online.
Perhaps this time around Hooker will depart from her usual m.o. and
deign to consult the available relevant data before rushing off to
sign up AFPL as a guinea-pig for another unsatisfactory Internet
filter? Certainly that's the absolute most we could
expect from Hooker, as she long ago made it clear she is not
interested in being the kind of leader who would even try to persuade
the trustees to abandon filtering (adult) library users' Internet
terminals on the grounds that it blatantly infringes on library users'
constitutional rights.
The Case of the Missing Memos
Posted November 19, 2003
For someone who claims she's running AFPL in a more business-like
way than her benighted predecessors, Mary Kaye Hooker has certainly
generated more than her share of confusion among the organization's
employees.
From the very beginning of her seemingly interminable
regime, one of the many annoying characteristics of Hooker's
administrative style has been her persistent failure to announce,
via memos or all-staff emails, the various work-flow changes
resulting from her various decisions--or, more usually, from
her failure to make decisions--or from various departures of
administrative personnel.
Probably the most notorious example of this counter-productive habit
is Hooker's failure throughout her tenure to produce an organization
chart for the library. Given Hooker's "scorched earth policy" of
systematically driving away most of the administrators she inherited
when she was hired in 1999, perhaps this is not surprising: most of
the uppermost boxes in any organization chart Hooker might have
distributed would be glaringly empty.
There have been plenty of other instances where the 400 employees of
the library have been left to their own devices to puzzle out what new
person is "temporarily" in charge of some major component of the
organization, or which sets of duties have been transferred elsewhere
--or nowhere--upon yet another administrator's abrupt and/or premature
departure.
These lapses of Hooker's have practical consequences for library staff.
Employees needing to contact an administrator for guidance with a
problem more and more often find they no longer know who to contact
about that problem. Staff are rarely even shown the courtesy of being
notified of new appointees' phone numbers and email addresses.
Examples of administrative matters that have gone unannounced or
unexplained to library staff:
- Emma Stanley-Tate's "temporary" (?) appointment as Central Library
Administrator.
- Building Manager Willie Kellings's replacement (staff haven't a
clue where they should send various forms and reports to that they
previously sent to Kellings).
- who, if anyone, is currently performing the duties of former Development Officer
Brian Williams, and which of those assignments are no longer anyone's
responsibility.
- the upshot of the much-publicized "plan" to outsource the courier
function.
- what happened to the library's afplweb.com URL when it became
inoperative for almost three weeks recently (and again this week).
- whatever happened to the plan (much talked-about-by-Hooker) to
re-design the library's web site.
- who's currently in charge of the Collection Development Unit,
who's currently part of that Unit, what the Unit's supposed to be doing
these days, and what functions of that Unit have been temporarily or
permanently abandoned.
- how the former Deputy Director's duties have been redistributed.
(Presumably Hooker parceled out those duties among her few surviving
immediate subordinates--but which ones?)
- who's in charge of deciding what online databases suddenly
appear on the library's web site. (For example, who decided to
purchase a license for the electronic version of Current Biography,
and where can staff lodge their complaint that this was a complete
waste of taxpayers' dollars?)
- when the county's freeze on hiring started, and if and when the
freeze was lifted.
Possible explanations of Hooker's consistent failure to keep
the staff informed of things that directly affect their effectiveness
as library employees:
- Hooker is an incompetent library administrator. Either she's
oblivious to the need to keep library staff informed, or she doesn't
possess the skills for circulating information throughout a large
organization.
- Hooker is merely breathtakingly inconsiderate. Acknowledging that
staff are worth the trouble to keep informed is simply a low priority for
Hooker.
- Hooker's highandedness is deliberate. She believes the "right to
know" about what's going on--or how it's supposed to go on differently--
ends at her bunker door.
- Hooker's failures as a communicator is not only intentional but
strategic. She believes either that an uninformed staff can be bullied, blamed,
manipulated, etc. more easily, or hopes that not telling the staff
something that she's decided somehow gives her more leeway later to
suddenly reverse or otherwise modify that decision should she need
or wish to do so. (Which happens frequently, as so many of her
decisions are impulsive or poorly thought through.)
- Hooker is terrified of creating a "paper trail" of her decisions and
failures to decide. She knows the consequences of so many of her
decisions and delays are counterproductive or harmful to the library,
and she's hoping that the scarcity of documentation will relieve her of any
accountability for what she does or refuses to address.
Whatever the explanation(s), Hooker's chronic failure to keep the
staff posted of changes in the library's administrative
structure--not to mention the changes in all those "behind the scenes"
tasks that are supposed to continue being accomplished despite the
numerous departures of key library personnel--is a major source of
frustration for library employees. Perhaps radical improvement in this
area should be added to that work plan "with measurable goals and objectives"
the trustees claim they are crafting for Hooker?
Trustees Violating the Georgia Open Meetings Act?
Posted November 14, 2003; updates posted December 4, 2003 and January 13, 2004
Despite the fact that a county attorney routinely attends its meetings,
it looks like the library's Board of Trustees violated
several sections of the Georgia Open Meetings Act at the board's most recent
meeting--and possibly at numerous previous meetings.
"Georgia's Open Meetings Act and Public Libraries," an article written
by Georgia lawyer Cathy Harris Helms for the Fall 2003 issue of
Georgia Library Quarterly, outlines the consequences of the
1999 state law as it applies to public library boards. Among other
issues Helms discusses in her article is a section about
how and when library boards are legally permitted to go into
"Executive Session"--closing a meeting temporarily to all but board
members to privately discuss certain legal or confidential
personnel matters.
Since AFPL's trustees began micro-managing personnel decisions at the
library in the mid-1990s, and especially after the library director
and several trustees were successfully sued for race discrimination
a few years ago, the trustees have frequently gone into "Executive
Session" without meeting the law's strict requirements for doing so.
Some library employees may remember, for example, that when the board
originally decided to hire Mary Kaye Hooker as library director, they
did so in an illegal-conducted Executive Session. When this was pointed out
to them, they had to call an open meeting to re-cast their votes.
To take a more recent example, the Board went into an almost-hour-long
Executive Session on September 24, 2003 in a manner that violated at
least three provisions of the Open Meetings Act:
- The Act requires that the board, before excluding all non-members from the
room, specify the reasons for going into Executive Session, and include
that statement in the minutes of the meeting. (According to the
minutes of the September 24th meeting, the reason was specified only
after the board resumed its open meeting almost an hour later.)
- The Act requires the board chair to conduct a vote on any motion to close the
meeting, to close the meeting only after a majority of the
trustees vote for the proposed Executive Session, and to record in the
minutes which trustees voted to close the meeting. (On September 24th,
a motion for Executive Session was made and seconded, but no vote was
conducted or recorded.)
- The Act requires the board chair to sign and file with the minutes an affidavit
that the discussion in the Executive Session was devoted to a matter
permitted by law. (There is no such affidavit attached to the minutes
of the September 24th minutes that were distributed to library staff
in mid-November. Perhaps someone could check every set of previous
board minutes containing an Executive Session since, say, November 1999
to the present to see if such an affidavit was filed with any of those
sets of board minutes?)
Less clear is whether or not the subject of the September 24th
Executive Session was legally permissible. The sections of the Open
Meetings Act pertaining to Executive Sessions permit trustees to
discuss disciplinary actions against an employee, but, according to
the GLQ article, the law does not permit boards to
close their meeting to "receive evidence or hear argument on charges
filed to determine disciplinary action." It's unclear from the board's
minutes whether whatever the trustees discussed on September 24th fell
into this category of unpermissible topics.
In any case, it's a good thing that the minutes
of the September 24th meeting report that "no action was taken" during
that meeting's Executive Session, as the Open Meetings Act requires that any
vote on a matter discussed in an Executive Session must be taken in an
open meeting rather than during an Executive Session.
Aside from expressing our amazement that Board Chair Annette Steed and Deputy
County Attorney June Green are failing to properly monitor the board's
compliance with Georgia laws, AFPLWATCH urges those members of the
board who want their proceedings to be legal to be more vigilant about
why and when and how often they vote to close their meetings. Every
infraction of the Executive Session provisions of the Act--in addition
to invalidating any decision made in an Executive Session--is cause
for a criminal lawsuit, and could cost the board $500 per violation.
AFPLWATCH memo to the board's Technology
Committee: According to the notes of your October 10th meeting, "the
Committee would like to discuss...at [a] Board of Trustee meeting
during an executive session" AFPLWATCH.com. Sorry, but the trustees
will have to discuss that particular matter in an open meeting:
discussing web sites, like discussing other forms of Constitutionally-protected
speech, is not one of the topics Georgia law allows library
boards to address in an Executive Session.
December 4, 2003 Update: The Executive Session of the
Board's October 22, 2003 meeting violated several provisions of the
Georgia Open Records Act similar to the ones the Board violated at
its September 24th meeting.
January 13, 2004 Update: The Executive Session of the Board's
November 19, 2003 meeting also violated several provisions of the
Georgia Open Records Act: the subjects discussed were not specified,
and the minutes were not accompanied by an affadavit signed by the
board chair.
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