In our last post we wrote about how the Park Ridge Library Board was enhancing its transparency and accountability by broadcasting its meetings live on WOW and posting the videotape on its website.
Little did we know that the very first televised meeting last Tuesday (09.15.15) would provide such a wonderful teaching moment, compliments of the departing Children’s Dept. Service Mgr., Kelly Durov – whose valedictory address (starting at the 17:35 mark of the meeting video)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oF0C1ovvSJk
illustrates a number of the things about the Library and local government generally that need to be changed and corrected if local government facilities and services are going to improve to where they should be.
The main premise of Ms. Durov’s remarks was that she would have preferred to have continued adding to her “longevity” at our Library but that “[t]here are some real issues that made leaving [her] job, a job that [she] loved, a reality.”
Whenever you hear public employees (or their union reps) talk about how much they “love” their jobs, you can be pretty sure they’re talking about the pay, the constitutionally-guaranteed pension that they often take years earlier than Social Security kicks in for the rest of us, the lack of accountability, the virtual inability to be fired, the virtual certainty their employer won’t pack up and move to Indiana or Guadalajara, or various other advantages they have over private employees.
And Ms. Durov didn’t disappoint.
“It would be disingenuous for me to say that salary were not a large part of my decision to leave.“
You’ll note that Ms. Durov didn’t say what her current salary is, how much she will be getting at her new job, or how many more Benjamins in her pay envelope would have persuaded her to stay. That wouldn’t have fit into her anti-Library Board narrative.
Similarly, while she applauded Director Janet Van De Carr’s “strong leadership,” she curiously forgot to mention that it is Ms. Van De Carr – and not the Library Board – who has full authority over all employees’ raises, including Ms. Durov’s. Nor did she mention whether she even asked Ms. Van De Carr for a raise, or whether she was turned down.
That wouldn’t have fit into her anti-Board narrative, either.
Fortunately for anyone looking to understand the true priorities of many public employees, Ms. Durov didn’t stop after having expressed the primacy of her pay check.
“I would urge the Library Board…to respect the management of the Library to set goals for our staff that will better the Library and the community, and to trust us when we deem those goals have been achieved.”
In other words, the Library Board should see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil – but just let “management” (a/k/a, Ms. Van De Carr) continue to do whatever it darn well pleases, at whatever cost and to whatever effect. And then the Board should let Staff decide for itself how good a job it’s doing.
Yes, folks, that IS the inmates running the asylum.
In Ms. Durov’s bureaucrats-gone-wild world, that means rejecting “squishy numbers such as circulation and door count” and embracing whatever un-measurable warm-and-fuzzies make Staff less accountable while also boosting its self-esteem – even as a metric like “circulation” (how many books and other items are checked out, so how “squishy” can that number be?) is at its lowest level since FY2007-08, down more than 112,000 items from its FY2012-13 high; and a metric like “door count”(how many patrons physically visit the Library, which IS a “squishy” number because management and Staff want it that way) is at its lowest level in at least a decade, down almost 115,000 from its FY2009-10 high.
But, bless her, Ms. Durov didn’t stop there, either.
“My integrity as a librarian has been compromised as we have implemented user fees, stopped supporting Food for Fines, and now are examining charging people to use Library space.”
Ironically, each of those three things Ms. Durov criticized was intended to make more non-tax dollars available for Library use, and they have done so – two facts that also didn’t fit into her narrative. More importantly, none of those three things implicates her actual “librarian” duties, although we confess to having no knowledge of any code of librarian “integrity” and couldn’t find one with a quick Google search.
If there is such a thing as librarian “integrity,” however, we would have expected it to have been severely “compromised” when Ms. Durov’s favorite director and a previous library board of bobbleheaded rubber-stampers decided to close the Library on Sundays during summer 2014 as a political stunt to embarrass the City Council and enrage the citizenry into coercing the Council into giving the Library more money, thereby avoiding the referendum that the Council nevertheless thrust upon a reluctant and unappreciative director, Staff and board.
But neither Ms. Durov nor ANY of her fellow Library Staffers showed up at any Board meeting to voice even the slightest complaint or objection to locking out all those patrons who regularly made Sundays the Library ‘s single busiest day of the week, based on average per-hour attendance.
That’s because when one cuts through all the bogus rhetoric, the Library’s “patrons” are little more than props that employees like Ms. Durov use for their own purposes, like arguing for more money in their pockets. So invoking the welfare of the Library’s patrons is just empty lip service designed to sucker those patrons into thinking that many/most(?) Staff members aren’t just mercenaries.
And thanks to a small-but-vocal minority of easily-bamboozled patrons and a complicit local press, that tactic usually works…until someone like Ms. Durov shows her true colors, captured on video, before selling herself to a higher bidder.
As the fictional Vincent “Vinny” Gambini might say: “Thank you, Ms. Durov. You’ve been a lovely, lovely witness.”
Robert J. Trizna
Editor and publisher
Member, Park Ridge Library Board
To read or post comments, click on title.