Don’t you hate it when you want the same thing as your friend wants, but you can’t agree on exactly how to get it? It really burns my feathers, guys. I don’t want fair-feathered friends on my side of the cage, I want yes birds, dammit! As in, whatever I say goes!
I think the folks over at the Santa Maria Public Library would agree with me. For that matter, so would the “Friends” of the Santa Maria Library. They can’t agree with each other, so the least they could do is agree with me. They are in a massive tiff over a memorandum of understanding that the city wants the Friends to sign, and these Friends don’t want to sign.
The two sides do agree on something. They sure don’t like their “legal issue” being referred to as a tiff. They were in a huff about it, emailing our reporter and managing editor like mad after our initial story ran on July 5. How dare you call something a name that describes it!
Nancy Marriott, “longtime Friend and supporter of our community library,” emailed our managing editor, saying she was very disappointed.
“The Friends of the Santa Maria Library would not have vacated the Library Shop, the ongoing fundraiser for the Friends, over a simple tiff,” she wrote.
What should we call it? A fight? A falling-out? A dispute? A quarrel? A disagreement? I bet both sides would agree that they don’t quite like those words either.
Funnily enough, they’re bickering with each other over the wording in a memorandum of understanding. The two entities haven’t operated under any such agreement in the past. But things are getting official, so official that it’s taken more than a year of negotiating to get this far, which is not very.
The Friends of the Library no longer has a used bookstore–which gives its proceeds to the library–in the library. In fact, the library opened its own used bookstore in the vacated space, because people were asking for it, according to Mary Housel, the library’s director.
Wow! Interesting negotiation tactic, guys.
The Friends board of directors sent a letter to Housel earlier this year stating that the proposed memorandum basically takes away all the nonprofit’s rights to determine how to obtain and disperse funding and resources and requires “the Friends to disband upon the demand of the librarian.” That’s an awful lot of power.
Sounds like the library wants to determine exactly how the nonprofit is going to operate! Then again, all of the other county’s libraries have similar agreements with the Friends that benefit them. What makes Santa Maria’s Friends so special?
It almost feels like the library doesn’t want its Friends anymore. And the kids who are supposed to benefit from this particular public service are caught in the middle of a schoolyard fight. You’d think they could put the childish tiff aside for a second and start adulting, hard.
Instead, the city refuses to make concessions, and Friends refuses to sign the memorandum.
As Jan Masaoka, the CEO of the California Association of Nonprofits, told us “When a library and a friends of library get into this kind of argument, there is something else going on.”
All the rest of it might just be the BS decorating the Sun that’s lining the bottom of my cage.
The canary knows adulting is hard, but everybody has to do it. Send comments to canary@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Aug 23-30, 2018.