The Christian County Library Board of Trustees caught many off-guard with an unplanned vote to elect a mostly new slate of officers at their August meeting. The Board and Library District will settle differences around that change in leadership in court. The contentions overshadowed a special meeting of the Board Tuesday, presided over by Allyson Tuckness, the Trustee who had been initially unseated as president in August.
During Tuesday’s special meeting of the Board Tuckness acknowledged a September 11 closed meeting the Board had with library legal counsel, reviewing District bylaws and the Missouri Sunshine Law. She asked for a vote to retract the August election. Trustees Echo Alexzander, John Garrity and Diana Brazeale abstained from the vote, with no public explanations.
All three are named as Defendants and the Christian County Library District and Trustee Janis Hagen are named as Plaintiffs in a petition filed for injunctive relief and a temporary restraining order in the Circuit Court of Christian County September 23. That suit claims the August election was never valid and seeks to prevent the three defendants from assuming officer positions until the Board’s regularly scheduled officer elections in December.
Hagen told KSMU after the board met with legal counsel September 11, she felt she understood they violated their bylaws, and the election needed to be corrected.
Hagen said the board needed to keep its focus on “what’s best for the library and keep doing the right thing.” She explained, that “things change, and people vote different ways and that’s fine, but that was a breach of our foundations.”
Library legal counsel Harry Styron was present during the meeting and was asked to weigh in on procedure throughout as Trustees questioned the implications of abstaining from votes and approving their August minutes. He declined to comment on the case to KSMU but said he expected a hearing in the next week or two.
The suit was only briefly acknowledged during the public meeting, it accuses all defendants of agreeing to the details of the August officer election prior to the meeting in what it calls a violation of the Sunshine Law.
It accuses Alexzander, referring to her by what it calls her legal last name, Schneider, of being informed by District Counsel August 30 that the election was invalid and afterwards attempting to transfer District bank account information using unapproved copies of meeting minutes and attempting to pressure library staff into making changes to Tuesday's agenda. The special meeting Tuesday also included a vote to fill the ostensibly vacant vice president position that received no nominations and a motion to send the question of the election’s validity to the Missouri Attorney General’s Office which received no second.
During the regular meeting that followed the Board asked Library Executive Director Renee Brumett for additional information about inter-library loan service providers as they consider alternatives to the library district’s service MOBIUS. They also continued a conversation on labeling LGBTQ+ materials and asked Brumett for additional information about tags and subject headings that appear alongside library book records in the library catalog.