The mayor’s lust to control and to manipulate every organ of the city government and the services it delivers, and to demand from every city employee their absolute allegiance or they will be threatened withtermination, cannot and should not be allowed to pollute the offices of the administration, the leadership and the rank and file at the city’spublic libraries.
The mayor, his city solicitor and his chief of staff are right nowpreparing a takeover by the city of the library from the Board of Trustees, which is chaired by Attorney Michelle Capone, the wife ofCity Councilor Attorney Fred Capone.
Capone and her fellow board members have done a stellar job of administering the library.
The library right now is about the last refuge for administration free of the mayor’s nasty grasp.
For the mayor’s vantage point, the dissolution of the library board of directors, which he is seeking, gives him another dozen or so employees to hire, to control, or to fire at his whim.
Eliminating the library board and reconfiguring the library to become another city department, allows the mayor to absolutely control it, as he does with all city departments.
As we have come to learn watching the mayor up close, controlling a city department is one thing.
Running it the right way is another.
The mayor’s brand of favoritism, that is, jobs given to the unqualified because they are friends, should not be the Parlin Library’s fate.
We urge the city council to carefully review whatever plans the mayor is presenting and to measure them against what the highest and best thing for the library might be.
The library shouldn’t become another political tool in the mayor’s boxful of them.