Dancing days are here again

The Council is preparing to appoint a new member (.pdf) to the Howard County Library Board of Trustees.

I hope this fellow is a little more critical of the library management and asks tougher questions than the Board has asked thus far. Admittedly, I don't know much about what the current Board has done, but I don't think it speaks very highly of the Board when library management is publishing misleading statistics claiming that 95% of county residents use the library when the Board has to know that is not true.

The worst thing that can happen to an organization is that the Board does not view management with a healthy degree of skepticism, and I fear that may have happened with the current Library Board. In the case of a publicly funded government entity like the HCPL, the Library's Board should really be advocating for the taxpayer since the taxpayers are essentially the stockholders. After all, he who pays the piper calls the tune.