Category: Campaigns

⚠️ ACTION ITEM ⚠️
Please sign this petition from AFSCME Council 31.

We Support Niles-Maine District Library Employees!

Tell the Niles-Main District Library Board of Trustees to STOP unnecessary and severe service and budget cuts to our library! #SaveNilesLibrary

LINK TO SIGN

We are not OK.

During the June 18, 2021 Special Board Meeting the anti-library bloc (Carolyn Drblik, Olivia Hanusiak, Suzanne Schoenfeldt, & Joe Makula) forced the resignation of Executive Director Susan Dove Lempke. We learned this after an unprecedented and painful 4-hour closed session during which library staff waited and waited. (video) Susan has served this community for 23 years and began her career at the Niles-Maine District Library in the Youth Department where she expanded access to storytimes and developed relationships with dozens of area schools. She will be sorely missed for sure and the community and library staff are reeling from this tragedy imposed upon us.

While we are taking time to mourn this loss, we cannot forget what is still at stake. The final version of Joe Makula’s scrawled up budget has been posted and will be voted on at the July 20th Board Meeting.

• The budget includes $450,000 in cuts to staff, mostly from the lowest pay grades. The remaining staff are expected to make up the work, which will mean a reduction in other services.
• The library’s open hours will be cut back from full operating hours (70) and even what they are now (66) to pandemic levels (54). 
• All outreach to schools and nursing homes is eliminated. 
• The trustees are still considering the corrupt contract with Steven Yasell, despite his lack of qualifications, apparent inability to pass a background check, and the existence of another less expensive proposal from a qualified professional. 
• Budgets for books and other materials are cut further than the already low levels from the pandemic. 

We are making plans for the July 20th meeting and hope you can join us. But no need to wait until then, here’s what you can do in the meantime. 

• Spread the word! Print out signs for windows (color, black & white), chalk savenileslibrary.org outside your house
• Let us know if you are planning to go to the 4th of July parade. We want to get as many people as possible along the route wearing buttons or stickers and cheering on the librarians. If you’d like to participate, please contact us or send us a message through social media. 
• Utilize the library! Check out books, and attend programs. The trustees have been using the low checkouts and visits from the pandemic to justify many of these cuts. Let’s show them that this community needs and uses its library.

In the month of June quite a lot has happened already, and there’s yet another Special Board Meeting scheduled for Friday, June 18th. This one is for an Executive Session so most of it will be held behind closed doors and the trustees may or may not bring anything back to vote on when they return from that closed session. Public comments are allowed for those attending in person who sign up when entering before the meeting begins, or can be submitted via email by 5:30 PM to Executive Director Susan Dove Lempke at slempke@nileslibrary.org 

The great news that came out on June 14th is that the employees of Niles-Maine District Library are forming a union with AFSCME! Read about it here:
Niles-Maine library employees form union with AFSCME

On June 14th the board also held a special board meeting to review the budget, where they were supposed to come to an agreement, though it was difficult because Joe Makula showed up with his own budget document that he sprang on everyone at the meeting without anyone else being able to see it in advance. Joe’s verison came not only with a column added for his cuts, but with typos and some new amounts that he couldn’t explain or describe when asked, so everyone had to wait until June 16th to find out whether the cuts were really so deep that the board planned to cut many library workers’ jobs or some or none.

June 16th was the regular monthly meeting of the board, though as with all of the other recent board meetings there were many irregularities. After an attempt by the new trustees to move public comments to the end of the meeting was abandoned, the public saw our letter-writing campaign make a difference, as one of the in-person commenters was Niles Mayor Alpogianis. He urged the trustees to work together and build bridges not walls, and pointed out that people see what’s going on, that the board is arguing about things like moving public comments (and he recommended they bring a copy of Robert’s Rules of Order to their meetings), and that there is a lot of chatter that doesn’t sound good. His own 5 children have used the library hundreds and hundreds of times and he would drop them off at the library and he felt safe, that a library is supposed to be a safe place (clearly making reference to Joe Makula’s strange complaints about children going to the library after school without their parents).

We also noticed that former Maine Township trustee David Carrobatta , who appears to be advising Carolyn Drblik, has been allowed by her to interject from the audience throughout recent meetings. On Wednesday he made clear that schools are coming up on their hit list, and we noticed that he said the quiet part out loud regarding firing library staff, with his “Cut staff? Boy I hope you do!”  Cruel and heartless.

The “up to” $1,500 disbursement to Steven Yasell was tabled without any explanation. For now we’ll take that as a win. To date 102 letters have been sent through our letter-writing campaign ”Reject the Corrupt Contract”, and the Mayor of Niles indicated in his public comment that he’d received over 150 emails, calls and texts from people who are concerned about what has been going on at the library. But we’re keeping an eye on this, as the board may just be biding time in hopes that we’ll stop paying attention.

Right now, the cuts to our library’s staffing is where we are focusing our attention and concern. At one point Trustee Drblik said that she didn’t think we were talking about cutting jobs, just cutting dollars. But when cutting payroll dollars it does mean either cutting staff or cutting their wages. She has suggested more than once that if things change later in the year that they can revisit and adjust the budget, but that’s really not an accurate representation of how budgeting works, and it’s extremely unlikely they’d go through the great deal of work involved in increasing the budget mid-year. So it’s important to make sure our voices are heard between now and the July 20th 6:30 PM meeting when the final budget for the next fiscal year will be voted on.

We’ll be keeping you informed if the board adds any more special meetings this month, and sharing actions you can take in July to support our library and the library workers our community depends on.

We have a new development regarding the corrupt contract the Niles-Maine District Library Board railroaded in.

As you may know, recently we launched a letter-writing campaign to send 50 emails to the board of trustees and the Mayor of Niles to “reject the corrupt contract” the new trustees awarded to their campaign videographer Stephen Yasell of “Yissilmissil Productions”. We’re glad to report that we exceeded that and extended the goal to 100. Despite the public outcry, and staunch objections from 3 of the 7 trustees, the board appears to be proceeding with the corrupt contract.

In our last blog entry we spoke about the way the board has been mangling the budget process. Journal & Topics also recently wrote a piece outlining the various cuts: Deep Niles-Maine District Library Budget Cuts. While this process and proposed cuts are alarming we are still wondering what happened with the Yasell contract. It was never mentioned in the budget meetings so we were compelled to request this information using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to obtain the proposal.

Turns out there were two proposals. One was, as expected, from Stephen Yasell, Film Director at Yissilmissil Productions on May 18th, a day before the new trustees were sworn in. The other was received on May 26th from a Business Architecture Transformation Specialist with a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Security and Forensic Investigation, a qualified expert!

The Yissilmissil Production proposal was open-ended with no estimation of time (“as needed”) with a service rate of $100 per hour. When challenged regarding that, library Trustee Carolyn Drblik flippantly mentioned capping the contract at $1000. But on what data was that determined?

The Business Architecture Transformation Specialist actually specced out an estimated 32 hours with a total of $960.

For anybody who has been watching some of these recent meetings you’ll know how the trustees have been scrutinizing bids and micromanaging the library to shave money off the budget. Somehow this suddenly escapes their purview.

After all we learned from the library staff during the budget workshops is this contract even necessary? If so, shouldn’t we go with a qualified professional at a fraction of the cost?

Let it be known that this is not acceptable in our community! (see below)

At the June 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Budget Workshops (videos here), Niles-Maine District Library’s department heads presented their proposed budgets for the next fiscal year (July 1 through June 30). As members of the community, we learned that days before these workshops, a copy of the Library’s proposed budget was marked up with lines drawn through many items. A FOIA request got us access to the marked-up budget document trustee Joe Makula and Board President Carolyn Drblik surprised department heads with before the budget workshops.

After many public commenters explained the impact of the proposed cuts to outreach programs for school children and senior citizens, it seemed like Board President Drblik might be reconsidering those cuts. If you don’t want to see the new board’s proposed cuts to hours of operation, purchasing of new books, loaning of technology, or any of the other cuts and notes on the document linked above, speak out now before the board’s upcoming votes.

Opportunities for action:

• Attend the meeting: 6/14/21 6:30 PM budget meeting at 6960 W. Oakton St. This is where trustees will discuss the budget for next year. Extreme cuts have been proposed by Carolyn Drblik and Joe Makula, and we assume that, as with every other action the new board has taken so far, that Olivia Hanusiak and Suzanne Schoenfeldt will go along with whatever they say.
  • If you would like the trustees and community to hear your concerns, when you enter the Commons Meeting Room (arrive before 6:30) sign in not only on the attendance sheet but also on the list of people who would like to make a public comment.
  • We’ve noticed that the library website’s information on how to submit a written public comment keeps disappearing and reappearing, so we can’t tell if they are considering removing the ability to submit public comments in writing. Usually if you send an email marked as a public comment by 5:30PM on the day of a meeting to slempke@nileslibrary.org, the comment will be read into the meeting (if there is time after the in-person comments have been spoken).
• Send an email to all of the trustees, and CC the library’s Executive Director and the Mayor of Niles.
  • You can use our letter-writing tool here, sending the pre-drafted message or editing it as much as you’d like:
• Attend the meeting: 6/16/21 6:30 PM regular monthly board meeting at 6960 W. Oakton St.