ALREADY PEGGED as "anti-intellectual" by the city's departing library director, Mayor Menino suddenly looked like a bully to boot this week after a powerful member of his administration jumped on the library's trustees' handling of trust accounts valued at $54 million. But heavy-handed or not, the administration is right to suggest that the city's library system suffers from a lack of transparency.
At present, city officials get next to no information on how library trust funds are spent. So a Feb. 5 letter from Lisa Signori, the city's director of administration and finance, to library president Bernard Margolis demands that those funds be monitored directly by the city's treasury department. Signori insists that revenues and expenses "be accounted for at a detailed level in order to accurately reflect the activity of each library trust." The letter makes no charge of poor stewardship, but the curt tone has heightened tensions between Margolis and Menino, who wants a new library head willing to subordinate the needs of the downtown research library to those of neighborhood branches.
A state law dating back more than a century places the library under the control of Trustees of the Public Library, a nonprofit board. Yet the funds to operate the system derive from a mix of the city's operating budget, state funds, private gifts, and revenue from trusts. City officials may dislike the idea that private gifts are being made to the library system, and not the city itself. But that's the intent of the law. The Menino administration should stay out of decisions about how the library spends its privately raised funds, many of which are restricted by the donors.
Transparency, however, is another matter, and the library system isn't exactly lucent. Attempts to track the use of grants to the library requires murky passage through a variety of financial statements, gift reports, minutes of meetings, and other dispersed documents. An institution that prides itself on organizing data for quick retrieval should certainly do better.
Under state law, Signori is the legal custodian of library funds, including private donations. That doesn't give her a voice in managing or using the funds. But she should have access after the fact to computerized ledgers that show whether money was spent on, say, custodial supplies or pricey consultants.
And key library supporters seem to agree. "To the extent that the issue is transparency," says library trustee chairman Jeffrey Rudman, "the trustees will most assuredly find a way to accommodate Ms. Signori's very legitimate concerns."
Failure to resolve the conflict could interfere with the search for a new library director. Potential donors also deserve greater clarity. Library officials should be crafting better reporting methods for gift money - and should be willing to circulate them, too.
