TRURO — In this town where several hundred people spent the spring in hot debates about voting, housing, lawn signs, and the meaning of the word “rural,” there is one thing that everyone seems to agree on: the public library is a gem.
“To me, the library is the de facto community center,” said Shawn Grunwald during public comments at the select board’s Aug. 13 meeting.
For the past 12 years, the Truro Public Library has been led by Director Tricia Ford, and people think she’s a gem, too. Last month, Ford announced her plans to retire in October. It won’t be easy for her to leave this job behind. “I’ve loved every minute of it,” she told the Independent.
Ford’s last day is Oct. 8, and the town is working on hiring the library’s next director. A search committee will conduct its first review of applications on Sept. 9, Town Manager Darrin Tangeman said on Monday. He hopes to have the next director appointed by the time Ford leaves.
As he does with the heads of all town departments, Tangeman has final authority to name the next library director. But Grunwald was one of seven people at the select board meeting advocating for more public participation in the hiring of Ford’s successor.
The town’s process for hiring a library director was a much-discussed hypothetical before town meeting passed a charter amendment in April 2023. That amendment was intended to ensure broad participation in the appointment.
The amendment, proposed in a petitioned article that was placed last on the warrant, kept hundreds of voters present to the meeting’s end. It added a single sentence to the charter, mandating that the town manager appoint the library director “after consultation with the Board of Library Trustees.”
The trustees are a five-member elected body that works with the library on policy and programming matters.
The amendment’s lead petitioner, Martha Magane, cited past charter changes that had excluded trustees from library director selection as the reason she thought this change was needed. And this week, she said, “The library trustees have kind of slipped under the radar when it comes to hiring a library director.” She described the trustees’ role as “monkey in the middle.”
When it was on the table, Tangeman said the charter change might cause confusion. It “could lead to unfounded assertions of authority and a mistaken outsized role for the Library Trustees,” he wrote in a comment on the article.
Despite that pushback, the charter change passed by a large majority. At the ballot on May 14, 2024, voters approved the measure by more than 600 votes.
With Ford’s retirement, the theoretical hiring question has become a practical one. It has also revealed that the new charter language describing that the hire be made “in consultation” with trustees means different things to different people.
This week, Tangeman said that the hiring process was not unfolding differently than it would have prior to the charter amendment, since it hadn’t changed or expanded the authority of the library trustees.
Magane, who was for many years the director of Eastham’s library and is now vice chair of the Truro library trustees, will participate in interviewing candidates for the position of director. Tangeman and Assistant Town Manager Kelly Clark will also serve on the hiring committee.
Ann Courtney, past president and current member of the Friends of the Truro Library, said she was hoping for more public participation on the hiring committee. “I’m hoping that it’s a very inclusive, broad-based committee representative of the community,” Courtney said.
“We are negotiating adding another community member, perhaps a former trustee or a library user,” the chair of the library trustees, Kait Blehm, told the Independent.
“We feel that two administrators and one person from the library board is a little out of balance,” Magane said.
The town is considering reaching out to library directors in other towns to sit in on interviews, Tangeman said Monday. They are also considering adding a member of the Friends, a nonprofit group that funds library programming, to the group.
As to whether the panel should include another library trustee, however, Tangeman said that town counsel had cautioned that might lead to Open Meeting Law violations.
That apparently did not happen in Provincetown when Amy Raff was hired to be library director in 2018. The interview panel there included two library trustees, a library staff member, one library volunteer, and one administrator, according to Town Manager Alex Morse. Raff’s second interview happened at an open board meeting before all the trustees, at which they and two community members asked questions, Morse said.
Eastham Library Director Melanie McKenzie took the job in 2021 after a hiring process that included interviews with at least two trustees and at least one member of the Friends of the Eastham Library, said Town Manager Jacqui Beebe.
Though she is the final appointing authority, Beebe said she works closely with trustees in hiring the library director. It’s a question about which, she said, “I would defer to the trustees.”
Keith Althaus has been a Truro library trustee for more than 20 years. In 2012, he was one of five members of the search committee that selected Ford. Three of the committee members were trustees and two were members of the community, he said.
That time around, Althaus told the Independent, “There were no members of the town government; they didn’t send anyone.” According to a report in the Provincetown Banner, that hiring committee chose two finalists from 10 applicants to interview with the town administrator and the departing library director. Ford was chosen unanimously.
When the charter change was discussed at town meeting in 2023, Althaus called the change “a restoration of common sense language.” But this week, he described the charter’s language as “vague”: “ ‘In consultation’ — I don’t know how you would settle that,” Althaus said.
Tangeman said he anticipated being on the same page as other interviewers about whom to hire. “I don’t think anybody who’s participating in this process doesn’t want the most highly qualified candidate to be the person appointed,” he said.
