NORTHAMPTON — The city has formally responded to a court complaint from the leaders of Forbes Library, shedding new light on Mayor David J. Narkewicz’s questions about the way library leaders spend taxpayer money.
“Since taking office in January 2012, the Mayor has become increasingly concerned about aspects of both the appropriation process for Forbes Library and the manner in which repairs are effectuated,” City Solicitor Alan Seewald wrote to the court in a Thursday filing. “The mayor, as the elected representative of the City’s taxpayers who fund the lion’s share of the Library budget, has also become concerned that the Library is not complying with open government laws that assure transparency in the expenditure of public funds.”
The filing states that City Hall has no way to “track and verify” the library’s actual expenditures against its budget, and that mid-year requests by the library for additional money are being made in the absence of information city officials need to determine whether they are necessary.
“The repeated mid-year requests for additional funding are inconsistent with the best practices in municipal finance in the modern era … ” Seewald wrote to the court.
The filing echoes the city’s position that the library’s trustees are a “governmental body,” created not by the will of Forbes but by two acts of the state Legislature and a vote of Town Meeting and are subject to the state’s open meeting, public records, procurement, construction bid and prevailing wage laws.
While the recent struggle between trustees and the mayor has made headlines, concerns over how trustees spend taxpayer money and account to the public are hardly new. The conflict reaches back decades.
More than 20 years ago, then-Mayor Mary L. Ford sought to get trustees to work more closely with the city on spending projects at the historic library on West Street — just as Mayor David J. Narkewicz is doing today.
“Please do not contract with any architect,” Ford wrote in a May 9, 1994, letter to Russell W. Carrier, president of the trustees, and Blaise Bisaillon, then the library director. “As you know, we had legal difficulties with even the small contract for emergency repairs recently.”
Ford’s letter referred to a project the library sought to fund with public money. The mayor insisted that she review the library’s spending plan. If the city was paying for the work, the library would need to “work closely” with both the city’s budget analyst and purchasing agent “before spending a cent,” she wrote. “Any improvements must be planned only after you have decided to alter your operations,” Ford’s letter concluded.
In a recent interview, Ford said that as the city faced revenue shortfalls and deficits in the 1990s, the library’s management emerged as a concern given the large amount of public devoted to the library, and how its spending related to more traditional tax-supported departments.
“We didn’t want to tell them what their internal decisions would be, but we wanted to make sure we knew about them and that there was some strategic thinking,” Ford said in a recent interview. “We were looking for integration. We wanted to understand how decisions, big ones and small ones, were made in all these places where there was spending of taxpayers’ dollars.”
More than two decades later, Narkewicz is raising similar questions about the library’s spending and management practices and looking anew at how Forbes operates under the city’s financial wing and whether it is complying with open government laws. Ford recalled being particularly distressed after learning trustees were negotiating a salary with a newly hired library director without consulting the city.
“I remember hitting the roof,” Ford said. “We found out they were negotiating a salary arrangement and hadn’t gone to our personnel department. We didn’t know if what they were offering was in line with our pay classification system.”
In January, Narkewicz sent a memo to Carrier requesting a meeting to discuss next steps regarding “ongoing maintenance and budgetary issues” at the library, established in 1881 under the will of Charles Edward Forbes and through acts of the state Legislature and Town Meeting.
“It’s not a new issue,” Narkewicz said of the city’s latest attempts to work with the library on financial matters. “It’s been a source of discussion for many, many years.”
Narkewicz’s memo included an opinion from city lawyer Seewald, who wrote that “Forbes made clear his intent that the Library, once constructed, be a municipal institution,” and as for management and control of the library, “the Library functions as a department of the City.”
Seewald further wrote that “as elected public officials that expend public funds for a public purpose, the Trustees are a public body and the employees of the Library are public employees.”
Seewald was scheduled to meet with trustees April 28, but they canceled the meeting. On May 20, trustees filed a complaint against the city in Hampshire Probate and Family Court, claiming the mayor views the trustees as a governmental body and library as a city department, rather than an independent institution operating under the terms of Forbes’ will. They asked a judge to “definitively interpret” the provisions of Judge Forbes’ will and trust.
“We can meet all we want, but the reality is, probate court is the only entity to rule on who’s right here, and we believe it’s in everybody’s best interests to have that ruling,” Carrier said.
The library’s elected trustees and employees say it is critical that the library remain independent of government, even if it receives more than $1.2 million in public funds annually, as well as other taxpayer dollars for capital projects.
Janet Moulding, the outgoing director of Forbes, said that libraries and public access to them are important to democracy and should never be “under government control.”
“It’s a principle that’s really important,” Moulding said. “It’s important that libraries are independent and there for the people.”
In interviews with the Gazette, Carrier said Forbes trustees are more invested in properly caring for the library. If left in the city’s hands, they fear, maintenance and repairs may not get the priority or happen with the speed they do now.
“We don’t ever want the library to look like the streets of Northampton,” he said.
In addition to library maintenance, procurement is another area that has raised concerns within City Hall. In April, Seewald sent a letter to the state inspector general seeking an opinion as to whether Forbes is subject to the state’s procurement laws. The city’s legal filing Thursday in probate court states that it has “repeatedly struggled with the Library’s disregard of the construction bid and prevailing wage laws.”
In the majority of cases involving large-scale, publicly funded work, Forbes has received technical assistance from the city’s procurement office, including advertising bids for work, which can be complicated tasks for most city departments, said Joe M. Cook, the city’s longtime procurement officer.
Cook said there have been occasions when work has gone on at the library that has not involved the city and did not follow the state’s procurement and prevailing wage laws.
“If I didn’t know about a project going on, it didn’t get done right,” Cook said. “If it’s public money going into a public building, it’s (required that workers earn the) prevailing wage. It’s the little things that slip through that haven’t been done perfectly.”
The city’s legal filing refers to design services for an elevator, repairs to the library’s slate roof and gutters, repairs resulting from an arson fire and HVAC, electrical and painting work as some of the library projects it alleges ran afoul of construction bid and prevailing wage laws “with the expectation that the City will pay those bills outside the Library’s annual budget.”
Asked about those maintenance and repair projects where city oversight was not involved, Carrier said they were funded with library endowment money and not taxpayer dollars — and therefore did not fall under the state’s procurement laws.
The latest arm-wrestling over maintenance work involves a project to install a new climate-control system and windows at the library. For the first time they can recall, trustees say the city has injected itself into the design process, with the mayor having the Central Services Department handle a request for proposals for design services and the hiring of an architect.
“That’s a complete change from past practice,” Carrier said. “They’ve completely taken the process away from us.” Carrier said trustees are particularly concerned with seeing improvements considered for the library that are not in line with its period architecture.
He cited the library’s new, nearly $500,000 elevator, which has historical details, as an example of the care trustees take in preserving the building’s historical integrity.
“Our feeling is, if the city was in charge of this from the beginning, what would that elevator look like?” he asked. “We don’t want some windows that aren’t appropriate for that building.”
In a statement last week, Forbes Library trustees said they seek to maintain the status quo and have always provided all financial information requested by the city.
“As Trustees, one of our responsibilities is to ensure Judge Forbes’ wishes are respected,” they stated. “We are therefore determined to prevent the unilateral imposition of these changes on the library. We seek to preserve the public/private partnership which has existed since 1881, when the City agreed to accept the express conditions of Judge Forbes’ bequest.”
Dan Crowley can be reached at dcrowley@gazettenet.com.