BELLOWS FALLS — Rockingham Free Public Library trustees, in a 5–3 vote on Sept. 18, fired Library Director Célina Houlné in an early- morning meeting attended by several dozen citizens and members of Friends of the Library.
The attorney for the former director has promised to sue the board and, potentially, individual members. In the aftermath of the vote, a trustee resigned from the board, the second in three months to do so.
According to Jan Mitchell-Love, board chair and member of the personnel committee, Emily Zervas, the library's historical and reference librarian, has been appointed interim director.
Houlné's attorney, Richard Bowen, described the evaluation process and subsequent dismissal of his client as “like a Kafka novel.”
That process included the trustees recessing an Aug. 29 board meeting to allow time for Houlné to respond to assertions in her performance evaluation and subsequent corrective action plan (CAP), yet reconvening Sept. 18 and taking a vote without that response.
No minutes of personnel committee meetings, personnel evaluation documentation, or other documentation about Houlné's employment is available to the public, which is a legitimate exemption in Vermont's public-records laws because of employee confidentiality issues.
But Bowen has been unable to get access to this information even as the attorney of the employee under scrutiny.
“We do not know why she was dismissed,” Bowen told The Commons. “You would think that the person being evaluated would have an opportunity to respond to some allegation or condemnation or performance.”
An abrupt end
With people still filing into the room, the board came out of executive session and voted.
The motion was made and approved before Houlné herself had taken her seat, and the meeting ended abruptly following the vote. Two Bellows Falls police officers were present to empty the room immediately following the meeting's adjournment.
Friends of the Library Chair Elayne Clift, who said she was extremely upset by the board's ruling, returned from out-of-state on a red-eye flight to attend the meeting.
She said the public was given no opportunity for comment, nor, she said, did she even hear the motion and vote to terminate Houlné, as it was taken while the public was still filing into the room to take their seats when the board came out of executive session.
In the hall afterward, Clift said she asked Trustee Paige Pietrzak why she voted for the termination.
Clift said the trustee told her, “If you knew what we knew, you would have, too.”
“Now they're floating a slanderous allegation” with no explanation, Clift said.
The following day, Trustee David Buckley, who was not present at the meeting, resigned in protest.
“It's a very complicated matter,” Buckley told The Commons.
“There are two sides to the matter. It should be boiled down to the decision not to allow Célina Houlné to have her request for a public hearing, which was in violation of fairness,” he said.
“Nothing should be construed to impair the right of a director to a public hearing to these formal charges,” he added, noting that Houlné had made a lengthy reply to her personnel evaluation “and wanted her day in open meeting.”
“Without giving her that opportunity, I felt I should resign in protest,” Buckley said.
'I knew it was coming'
Houlné, who had worked as library director since 2008, responded on Sunday.
“I'm exhausted, honestly,” she said. “I knew it was coming because of what's been going on the last few months. I felt they were building up to this [and] it was their intent to do this.”
On May 14, Houlné was served a corrective action plan (CAP) by the three-member personnel committee, comprised of Mitchell-Love and trustees Hope Brissette and Laura Senes, without the approval of the full board.
She said that at a meeting on May 17, she told the committee that on the advice of her attorney, she would not discuss the CAP or an accompanying task list because it had neither been discussed nor approved by the full board.
Trustees called a special board meeting for May 22, where five of the six members attending voted to issue the probationary plan.
Houlné says that she was never given an opportunity at any point to respond to the CAP [“Library gets temporary home; librarian called on carpet,” News, May 29], which consisted of six headings and more than 20 bullet points over eight pages and outlining the board's allegations of faults that it said it found with the library director.
In the CAP, issued as a result of a complaint by Trustee Deb Wright, trustees accused Houlné of “undermining the authority of the board as a whole, as well as individual board members,” an “ongoing pattern” of ignoring requests for information from the board, “operating outside the stated bounds of the position,” and “not performing duties as per job description.”
The same themes dominated Houlné's performance evaluation.
On Aug. 29, in a meeting that the trustees described as “recessed” and for which they still have not released minutes, the board emerged from executive session and the motion was put forward to terminate Houlné, according to board member and local lawyer L. Ray Massucco.
Massucco said he made a “friendly amendment,” which was moved and seconded, to give Houlné two weeks in which to respond.
However, Houlné was given only the opportunity to respond in writing to her annual performance evaluation, which precipitated the CAP document and process.
“I have asked to see all the data on which their recommendations were based,” said Bowen, who began representing Houlné immediately after she was served the CAP in May. “The chair refused at each occasion.”
“[Houlné] wanted to review the numerical data upon which the recommendation for termination was based but was refused that information by the chair. I do not know if it was shared with other board members,” he concluded.
When the board reconvened on Sept. 18, Bowen asked if he and Houlné would be allowed into the executive session and be given the opportunity, finally, to respond to the CAP allegations. Bowen was told they would not.
In her response to her evaluation, Houlné challenged the premises of the “areas of concern” point by point, amply citing correspondence, library policy, and meeting minutes. The phrases “untrue,” “not true,” “false,” and “falsehood” appear in her responses 15 times.
Except for a brief confirmation that she had retained a lawyer, Houlné has been unavailable for comment to The Commons, on or off the record, since May. Bowen and Houlné agreed that she could now comment about some of her difficulties.
Bowen said the lawsuit might address “wrongful termination, harassment, violations of state and federal law ][or] violations of their own charter.”
“People can be held personally liable or a board can be held liable,” Bowen said. “All these things will be explored.”
'I don't know what they know'
Houlné rejects the rumors that the board “knew something” the public does not know.
“I have not done anything wrong. It sounds like this is something nobody else knows about,” she said, noting the three trustees who voted not to fire her and the resignation of the fourth, Buckley, the next morning.
“If there was something so damaging, why wasn't it in the evaluation? There wasn't [anything of that magnitude]. If it was so damaging, why wouldn't I have been fired on the spot? What was so damaging?” Houlné asked rhetorically.
“I have a lot of supporters. They know how I work and have seen my work for the last five years. They know how honest and conscientious I am. So when there are people out there saying, 'Oh, you don't know what we know' - I don't know what they know.”
“You couldn't have a more transparent person. That is what it is so ironic,” Houlné said. “They are acting like I am hiding things. I'm the one that is trying to keep them from hiding things for the last year. I believe in transparency and that is what the open meeting law is all about.”
The Board of Trustees is currently under investigation by Assistant Attorney General Bill Reynolds for possible violations of Vermont's open meeting law.
Asked how she managed a calm, respectful, and concise manner given the tone of the grillings she has recently received when she has presented reports and information to the board, she replied, “My nature is to be a mediator. I am not confrontational.”
“I would not respond to them in a like fashion, of being disrespectful or hurtful or mean,” she said.
A deteriorating relationship
From her perspective, Houlné said that her relationship with the Board of Trustees began deteriorating in June 2012, shortly after work began on the renovation and addition to the historic library building.
Since that point, she said, Mitchell-Love “worked to diminish my influence and undermined my authority as director in many ways. In particular, she shifted my role as liaison between board members, by taking over the role of sending out meeting minutes to the trustees, a clear violation of the library bylaw which requires that the director send the minutes to the full board.
“She also took away my role to send out agendas to the board, which she took over doing, and she told the committee chairs to also do this. She repeatedly said my participation in committee meetings was not needed, and she tried to remove me from any participation in the renovation, even though the board had voted to have me be the staff representative to the weekly job meetings.
“Even more importantly, she made these decisions unilaterally, without prior approval of, or discussion with the board, about changing how we have been operating ever since I was hired in 2008.
“She assumed responsibility for making decisions outside of board meetings, decision-making power that the board never gave her.
“This resulted in her giving me her own directives that were never discussed or voted on by the board.”
Houlné said that in the summer of 2012, her board chair, contradicting a previous mandate from the board as a whole to instruct Baybutt - the first contractor for the project whose bankruptcy last winter created a constellation of difficulties for the town and the library renovation - to get lien waivers from its subcontractors.
In these documents, subcontractors assert that they have been paid for the work and waive the right to put liens on the property under construction.
Houlné said that Mitchell-Love “had me dismiss the town attorney's services, saying we couldn't afford the legal fees, and she declared that we didn't need lien waivers from the sub-contractors,” an assertion that the former library director backed up with email.
“She continued in this vein, directing board members that they could not attend committee meetings if they were not on the committees, holding Personnel Committee meetings without public warning, and without telling other board members, nor allowing them into executive session discussions,” Houlné asserted.
“As I was well aware of Vermont's open meeting law, I tried repeatedly to guide the board to follow the law, but this was seen as insubordination, since I challenged the chair's interpretation of the law and her actions by informing her and the board of what the law required.
“In summary, the chair set me up to fail,” Houlné said. “She excluded me from discussions that she had with trustees outside of the board meetings, so that I wouldn't know what concerns they would bring to the meetings, which left me uninformed and unprepared. Or she made demands that were impossible to fulfill in the time frame given.”
The former director, who took a medical leave of absence as a result of the stress of the situation earlier this year, accused trustees of slandering her, including spreading rumors that she had been engaging in an inappropriate relationship with Duane Whitehead, who happened to be the trustee representative to the weekly job meetings.
Houlné said that that rumor is wholly unfounded and was reprimanded in her CAP for publicly repudiating it in an open meeting “knowing the stigma this would place on the RFPL.”
“These and numerous other similar incidents left me feeling embattled, as the criticism and machinations increased through the year.
Meanwhile, “during all the time the CAP committee, personnel committee, and the full board had been discussing my alleged performance issues in one closed session after another, week after week, I had never once been asked or allowed into their executive sessions to present my point of view on these matters so that the board could hear both sides of the issues, despite my repeated requests to do that,” Houlné said.
Houlné included a summary of what she believes were her accomplishments in her 4½-year tenure, citing point by point improvements in customer service, financial stability, preservation of the library's historical collections, and addressing the long-term condition of the building, a process that culminated in the almost-completed renovation.
Asked if she would consider returning under a change in board leadership, Houlné's response was resoundingly positive.
“Yes, I would,” she said. “I love the staff. I love the library. Things were going fantastically. Everything was great.”
Next steps for library
Zervas, the interim library director, and the rest of the staff will have their hands full unpacking and preparing for the reopening of the 1909 library, one of more than 2,500 worldwide, and only four in Vermont, built with money donated by steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie.
According to Youth Librarian Samantha Maskell, no firm date has been set for the opening, but she and her colleagues are “carefully scheduling programs for October and November.”
The search for a part-time librarian to administer much of the library's community programming will continue, though no ads have appeared for the position, most recently held by Ed Graves.
The board approved such a move at its Sept. 10 meeting, after trustee Massucco disagreed with the chair and several other members who wanted to eliminate the position.
Mitchell-Love had wanted to cut the position as a “cost-saving measure” with consideration to renovation cost overruns of $55,000.
Both Massucco and then-treasurer Buckley said that the position had already been approved at the last Town Meeting and thus was a part of the budget.