More than a third of the seats on the Jackson-Hinds Library Board of Trustees are vacant, and it’s been like that for at least a year.
Five out of 14 seats on the board are open and await decisions by either Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba or the Hinds County supervisors about who will fill them.
The mayor is responsible for appointing citizens to fill the vacant positions that represent Ward 1, Ward 2 and Ward 6 and the city council confirms his recommendations.
“It’s the mayor’s decision as to who to put up for a board member,” said Ashby Foote of Ward 1. “Council members can make recommendations.”
The supervisors handle naming trustees for the vacant seats that represent Hinds County District 5 and Hinds County at-large.
The trustees are vital to the library system’s strength and wellbeing because they approve spending and policies, said Michelle Hudson, a retired reference librarian who worked for the Jackson-Hinds Library System from 1988 until 2016.
“That is an important position, and each vacancy needs to be filled,” she said. “If you look at the minutes of the board, you can see where there are sometimes not enough trustees present to have a quorum for a board meeting.”
The trustees oversee and make decisions about the system, which provides services at seven library branches in Jackson and seven in Hinds County. Trustees also approve expenses, with input from the director and other administrators who handle day-to-day operations.
Among the important decisions the board has faced is terminating Patty Furr, the system’s former executive director, which it did on June 30, 2020. The lawsuit of Furr against the system is set for a jury trial scheduled April 18, 2022 in U.S. District Court before Judge Carlton W. Reeves.
Rickey Jones, who represents Ward 5 and chairs the library board, appears to have made city and county officials aware of the vacant seats.
The minutes of the Dec. 1, 2020 board meeting report that Jones “concluded his report by announcing that appointment letters had been sent out to the Board of Supervisors, the City Council, and the Mayor of the City of Jackson for Trustees to fill the five current vacancies.”
The minutes of the Feb. 23 meeting show: “Chairman (Rickey) Jones stated that letters have been drafted to send out to the Hinds County Board of Supervisors, as well as the Mayor of Jackson and the City Council of Jackson regarding the empty seats on the Board for additional Trustees. Chairman Jones said that the final piece of information is, in reference.”
The minutes of the April 27 board meeting also report that that Jones had spoken with the presidents of the Jackson City Council and the Hinds County supervisors about appointing board members for the vacant seats.
It’s not easy to get people to volunteer for such a position during the era of COVID-19, said Hinds County District 1 Supervisor Robert Graham, who has spoken to one person about filling the at-large position and would like to speak to five or six more about it.
“People are not volunteering at the rate they once were,” he said, noting that the global coronavirus pandemic gives them an automatic reason to say no.
When told about Graham’s observation that people are reluctant to volunteer their time to serve on boards, Hudson suggested that perhaps that reflects their opinion of the library system.
“The fact that they’re not volunteering like they once did to serve shows an apathy for the library system,” she said.
Current trustees for the library system are Earline Strickland of Hinds County District 1, treasurer; Mary Garner, Hinds County District 2, vice chair; Sue Berry of Ward 7; Imelda Brown, Ward 4; the Rev. Danny Ray Hollins, Hinds County at-large; Alferdteen Harrison, Hinds County District 3; Chester Ray Jones, Ward 3; Ricky Nations, Hinds County District 4.
The board usually meets at 4 p.m. on the fourth Tuesday of each month, except for June and December. Meetings are usually held in the computer lab at the Eudora Welty Library in downtown Jackson but are subject to change.
The COVID-19 pandemic, the loss of revenue from branches closed because of the coronavirus pandemic, employee retention and buildings that need repairs are issues the Jackson Hinds Library System faced in fiscal year 2019-2020, according to its most recent audit.
Some of those same issues continue to plague the library system in 2021.
