ANTIGO — At its monthly meeting Monday, the Langlade County Board approved a motion by Chairman Ben Pierce to replace himself on the Antigo Public Library’s Board of Trustees, bringing about a disquieting, perhaps temporary end to several contentious weeks that began with a disagreement over the library’s budget.
The county holds authority to appoint five members on the library’s nine-seat board, and prior to Monday’s meeting, many assumed Pierce would move to replace two of those members, Ken Shestak and Moira Scupien, whose terms expire in April. Some in attendance were still openly protesting in the moments before Pierce’s announcement that he would step down and appoint fellow board member Carol Bardo in his place, a move that came as something of a surprise, given that it hadn’t been placed on the meeting’s agenda until mid-morning Monday.
“I’ve gone around and around with this, and I think the only logical point right now [is] I don’t think I’m going to make any positive influence on that board as it sits,” Pierce said.
“There’s still people on there that clearly want to go a different direction than I do. One of them is Ken Shestak. I love the man, absolutely love him. I’ve known him forever. I’m not going to pull him…terms expire. There’s a term for a reason. It lasts for only so long. And then the appointing official has to fill it, vacate it, or reappoint. It’s very simple. I’m removing myself, folks. And upon vote, Carol Bardo is going to take my position. That’s effective immediately…The other term that is up is Moira Scupien. I’m not choosing to replace her at the moment. The only removal here today is myself, and that’s it.”
Both Pierce and Bardo said they hoped the change would help the library board continue to function.
“We have been talking, and I observed how he was attacked at the meetings, and I told him, ‘Do you want me to take this over?’ There’s been stuff going on for months. It shouldn’t be that way. We need to be working together. There has just been a lot of hate put out on social media, which is not accurate. That needs to stop. We need to come together. I have grandchildren. I used to live by the old library. Everyone on this county board wants that to be a viable service. We’re not going to let it end. So they need to stop what’s going on. I’m ready to take it on and do what needs to be done to bring us all together,” Bardo said.
Library Director Ada Demlow — who said she wasn’t surprised by Bardo’s appointment, given that Pierce sent her to a library meeting last week in his place — said she suspects the move wasn’t about peace-making, but about avoiding possible legal repercussions for holding a closed session at a county board administrative meeting Feb. 21.
“I think that they knew that because they had a closed session last Wednesday, that implied that they were discussing things that harmed people’s reputations, and they knew that if they removed people, they would have to answer to why that wasn’t the case,” Demlow said. “They harmed their reputations just by putting that out there, and that was not actually a legal move. I think they realized that and they decided not to do the removals last night and they’re going to wait until the terms end because then they have a stronger legal ground for doing that.”
The conflict began last month, when Demlow approached Pierce and other city and county officials to seek greater funding for the library, which has not had a budget increase in 14 years. Demlow asked for the increase to overcome a significant budget shortfall the library will face in 2025 caused mostly by spikes in the costs of health insurance for city employees (costs the library must pay each year for the combined benefits of its five full-time staff members have risen to levels approximately $50,000 higher than they were four years ago).
At the meeting, however, county officials noted that from their perspective, the library was actually already receiving too large a budget, given that the county had recently been billed that year for approximately $19,000 from Oneida County for services it had provided to Langlade County citizens, and that the Antigo Public Library itself recently had received cross-county service payments from neighboring counties as well.
“Instead of talking about our shortfall that we’re going to have in 2025, they spent that meeting talking about those fees we collect and how we should be passing them along to them,” Demlow said. “So I knew in that meeting that there was not going to be a productive discussion about funding…They wanted to take more. Instead of offering, ‘OK, what can we do to fix this funding issue,’ they said, “Let’s talk about taking more from the library.’ So I made up my mind at that point that the most fruitful thing to do was that the public understand how our funding work and let them do the advocacy.”
At Monday’s meeting, however, Pierce, who noted that every county department he oversees has its hands held out for money, characterized this “advocacy” in a negative light.
“To vilify your funding sources on social media and to vilify us [with] half-truths, do you think that brings us to the table with our wallets out on the table to say, ‘What do you need?’ Do you think that’s a proper, professional way to go? Absolutely not,” he said. “Anybody that knows me knows you’re not going to stab me in the back and then have me open up my wallet for more money. I’m not going to behave that way. I’m going to look at you in your eyes, have a conversation, and I’m going to make a decision…that’s how I do business. That’s the right way to do it.”
Complicating the debate between the two sides has been the somewhat complicated mixture of library funding sources. Unlike typical government departments funded by either the city or the county, it is funded equally by both — in 2024, each will pay approximately $306,000 to run Antigo’s main branch, as well its more limited Elcho and White Lake facilities. State statute also allows it to maintain a savings fund, something no other government departments are allowed.
In addition to shifting budgetary norms, the past week’s meetings have been colored by discussions of the legality of proceedings. While the Library Board has now secured its own legal counsel and Demlow, along with Board President Sheryl Perkins, believe the closed session during last Wednesday’s meeting may have been illegal, Robin Stowe, the county’s corporation counsel, suggested this wasn’t so.
“If we think you’re going to talk about people by name, then the law allows a governing body such as yours to do this in closed session because there are privacy interests and reputational interests,” Stowe said. “We even do this when we might be saying things that are good about a person.”
“It protects us that if you’re going to have a discussion or you need to have a discussion where you’re identifying people by name, then best practice is to go into a closed session.”
Looming behind the debate, too, according to Pierce, have been ideological differences. At the Feb. 21 meeting, Pierce briefly mentioned, for instance, several years ago requesting a book with a title to the effect of “Defund the Police” displayed in the library’s children’s section be removed and placed in the adult section. A library representative at the meeting protested this characterization as unfair and said the library staff didn’t put the book in that section, which Pierce balked at.
“If the library staff knew the cover of the ‘Defund the Police’ book did not represent the very contents of this book, why on earth would they showcase the cover in the children’s section of the library? Those are questions people should really be asking themselves,” Pierce said following the meeting.
Though Pierce, a lightning rod for criticism from the library’s supporters, no longer sits on the board, what lies ahead for the Antigo Public Library, which will have a close to $70,000 deficit in 2025 if all things remain equal, remains deeply unclear. Its savings could mitigate this to something like $40,000, but then will be completely depleted, exacerbating their funding problem even further for future years.
Demlow said she doubts that the county’s perspective on their budget will change.
“They act as though I’m being uncooperative and taking money that belongs to them, but it’s state law,” Demlow said of the cross-county payment revenue and savings account. “It is the way it works. It is the way it works for every other library system, too. It’s consistent throughout the state, it’s not something we made up…I agree that there’s maybe parts of that law that maybe could use some changing. But to imply that we’re trying to do something shady when we’re following the law…I don’t know what to say.”
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