ANTIGO — The Langlade County Board appointed two new members to the Antigo Public Library (APL) Board Tuesday night, a long-expected move that seems highly likely to shift control of the latter board and possibly lead to considerably altered policy decisions at the library in the near future.
By a 17-2 vote, the County Board approved Christian Radcliffe and Nancy Jones, the two candidates recommended by County Board Chairman Ben Pierce. Pending board approval, Pierce’s position provides him the authority to appoint personnel to external boards like the library’s at any time.
Radcliffe and Jones will replace Ken Shestak and Moira Scupien, who both had already served two 3-year terms on the APL Board. Though the pair had made clear their desire to serve a final three-year term, both received letters last Friday notifying them of their removal.
The decision was made in part simply because Shestak’s and Scupien’s terms had ended, according to Pierce, who had served on the Library Board until replacing himself in late February. At that time, suspicions that he would replace Shestak and Scupien first arose.
“How we do things is very different to what direction they were going in. They say it shouldn’t be partisan, but it is very partisan to them. The former head of the Democratic Party of Langlade County was the treasurer. They say there’s no diversity now, but there was never diversity until I stepped foot on that board,” Pierce said following Tuesday’s meeting.
“Now there will be five members representing Langlade County and Langlade County citizens. And on a board of nine, five members are strong. So how will they get things done? Just like they’ve gotten things done for the last decade. They’ve always had the majority, with single-minded thought. There’s been no diversity. Now there’s diversity.”
Scupien’s and Shestak’s removal came nearly simultaneously with the resignation announcement of Library Director Ada Demlow — who in January began publicizing information about the budget shortfall the library is projected to face in 2025 — and a meeting with local officials during which Pierce nevertheless expressed unwillingness to increase its funding.
In a letter to Library Board President Sheryl Perkins dated April 8, Demlow wrote she was resigning because her “ethics and morals do not align” with the current County Board’s.
“Their chairman’s flawed morality which forces all library board members to align with him, and the board of supervisors’ failure to be accountable to their constituents has led to the complete reshaping of the Antigo Public Library Board of Trustees. This began in April of 2022 before I even became the library director, and it will be complete April 9, 2024. To work effectively with this realigned board, I would have to also realign my professional and personal moral standards to match theirs, and I refuse.”
Scupien also said she believed the library board was essentially being stacked unethically.
“We can’t have people on the Library Board doing the bidding for the County Board. Ben has not been shy about that. He said, ‘We want people on the board who line up with the county.’ In order for a library board to remain separate from city and county, it’s important that your library board be only for the library’s interests,” Scupien said.
John Medo, a vice chairman on the County Board, though, agreed with Pierce’s assessment that this week’s appointments will in fact be true representatives of Langlade County citizens, especially in terms of their fiscal responsibility.
“I’ve been on the board for almost six years and leadership for four years,” Medo said. “Just about all groups that we fund or work with are more than willing to partner and collaborate. We haven’t seen any of that with the Antigo Public Library, even when asked. Also, this County Board is very, very interested in accurate financing, and with the library board, that has not been transparent.”
Shestak, who by all accounts has a respectful rapport with Pierce, said he still believes that the fact that the library has not received even a modest budget increase in the past 14 years is wrong.
“I don’t know if they have a real sense of value to put more money into it,” Shestak said. “I think they have that backwards and think like, ‘We don’t want to put more money into a library because it’s just a library.’ But they’re very conservative with spending people’s money, and they don’t really have the money to just flood the library with the funds they need to keep up with inflation,” Shestak said. “I wanted the library to be funded with real sufficient funds. The previous director knew the same thing about how you can’t go 20 years with a two percent increase. There’s been quite a few things that went up in 20 years.”
Perkins said she feels deep concerns about how the library’s looming budget deficit will be handled given that most now feel five of the nine board members are “aligned” with the county’s views of the funding levels it deserves.
“Surely I think we will have large cuts,” Perkins said. “It’s a city-county agreement and they have to come to an agreement about how much they will fund. We were having to ask for more funding because in the last 13 years our funding has stayed flat. So we were going to be asking them for more money, and of course the county has balked at that again, and so there is no doubt in my mind that there is going to have to be significant cuts at the library if funding is not increased.”
She went on to claim that the new order on the library board is just part of a larger phenomenon in the area.
“It is just this group of people that are trying to turn this county and our community into only one way of thinking,” Perkins said. “It’s on the school board. It’s on the county board. To a lesser extent, it’s trying to impose itself on the city council. And now, it has taken over our library board.”
Pierce and Medo, both well aware of the somewhat dark rhetoric of this kind from their opposition, said they have high hopes that brighter days lie ahead for the library, including for the APL’s satellite libraries in Elcho and White Lake, which they feel have been somewhat neglected.
“There will be five board members that will demand participation and transparency. So there are four other members and I hope they all collaborate and the nine of them search for information and poll the people as to how Antigo Public Library should run, the Elcho Public Library, and the possible library we set up in White Lake. I believe in my heart that you’ll see nine people work together in the libraries in Langlade County,” Medo said.
Langlade County Corporation Counsel Robin Stowe — who has often been at the center of disputes in recent months as some such as Perkins and Demlow have called into question the legality of closed sessions and late agenda changes which have typified County Board meetings about the Library Board — said he also has hopes for some sort of reconciliation between both sides in this matter.
“The way the library mechanism is structured in Wisconsin, it’s set up for this inherent tension. Now things have gotten far too personal. Getting back to the partnership that we had where we were working together and had equal input on things, I don’t know how we get back to that, but I hope we can,” he said.
Stowe went on to say that, in a way, what both sides have in common is that they are dealing with a measure of unfairness — the County Board’s side because the library strangely does have legal control of all the assets that have been funded by the county and city, and the library side because APL Board members can be removed without cause.
“The library side is saying, ‘I don’t think Ben can do this.’ Yeah he can. He can do it. People may not like that, but this is the situation that was created for libraries. The library board is autonomous, has exclusive control over assets, and can make decisions they want. What can the city and county do? They can appoint people to the library board. They can remove people from the library board for no reason. You have the right to make those decisions. Ben can appoint and remove. Are they scrutinizing that? Well, I think it works both ways.”
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