Quincy Votes! stands by its reporting of library board meetings

This letter was submitted to The Quincy Sun on September 30:

In the Sept. 19 issue of the Sun, Library Director Sara Slymon addressed why she had refused to provide her report of library happenings to members of the public who attended the most recent public meeting of the library’s board of trustees.

She said she had often summarized these reports verbally at board meetings, but then the civic engagement group Quincy Votes! started sending a representative to the meetings who later reported on them at quincyvotes.org. Director Slymon wrote that she began to worry about violations of privacy, adding that the Quincy Votes! write-ups were “often riddled with inaccuracies, spelling and grammatical errors, and mischaracterizations of what is said at the meetings.”

As a board member of Quincy Votes!, I take issue with that assessment. In May, Director Slymon asked to speak with me about our meeting write-ups. She noted a few spelling mistakes, which I fixed, but when I asked her to name substantive errors, she remained silent. 

Instead, she complained that the write-ups addressed her using her name rather than her title, that one write-up broke news about a foundation director’s appointment that she had hoped to announce herself in a press release, and that some of her statements could potentially be construed as critical of the administration’s responsiveness. She said that our reporting would have a “chilling effect” on her ability to speak candidly at board meetings. 

I said that I understood her frustrations, but reminded her that these were, after all, public meetings. I explained that we had started this reporting project because consequential decisions are made at city board meetings (such as the November 2022 park board vote to repurpose the Ruth Gordon Amphitheater). Because city board meetings are usually poorly attended and their published minutes are often unintelligibly brief, I said that Quincy Votes! would continue to attend and report on them. I followed up with an email asking Director Slymon to alert me if she found any errors in our write-ups, but I heard nothing back. 

I did hear back from our volunteer notetaker, however, that library board meetings had been getting harder to attend over time. One day our volunteer had to walk around the building to find the note about how to access the board meeting, as it was not on the usual doors near the library parking lot. A couple of days before another board meeting, the location was changed to a different branch, causing confusion and delaying a couple of library board members.

Overall, library leadership has been anything but welcoming since our volunteer started attending these meetings, calling into question the director’s assertion that she supports and encourages members of the public “to take an interest in the comings and goings at the library.” 

We were happy to read that the legal counsel retained by the library director seems to be upholding the requirements of the state’s open meeting law, as Director Slymon notes in her Sun letter that from now on her reports will be available to all interested parties, and even published in this newspaper. 

Quincy Votes! hopes that the city will remind all department heads of the requirements of our open meeting law – and to embrace the spirit, and not just the letter, of that law.

Maggie McKee

Vice President

Quincy Votes!