 All right, good afternoon, everyone. I'm going to call to order our meeting. We do have a quorum. At this time, will you please rise and join me in the Pledge of Allegiance? All right. At this time, there are no public comments. Looking at item 1.4, would someone like to make a motion for the approval of the minutes? Trying to see who. For those of you who are at home, I'm happy to see you join us. And I'm just trying to make sure that a few more people actually get a chance to speak with their microphones that are here in the room. So I believe that Sherry Speth attempted to make a motion for those minutes. So moved. All right, and is there a second? I'll second. Nancy? Nancy, thank you. It's been moved and seconded. Would any other discussions or comments or questions? Okay, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion carries, thank you. For the next item of 1.5, correspondence, announcements and common council reports, I just wanted to share with you that those of you who have been on the board this past year, this tends to be an item that takes less than 20 seconds. But today I actually have something under each category of correspondence, announcements and common council reports. So bear with me as I go through several good information. Number one, I just wanted to share with all of you and those of you who are at home, you're just going to have to come to the library and actually see this lovely card. But we did receive a very lovely thank you card to the board and it is from our Meade Public Library staff and it states, thank you for your thoughtful acknowledgement of National Library Week. It's wonderful to have such support from our board members, kind regards Meade Public Library staff. So I just wanted to share that piece of correspondence. The next item that I wanted to also mention is that it's not very often that we actually get to have a board meeting on Earth Day. So I just wanted to say happy Earth Day and I'm very disappointed that we're not able to do this meeting outside. We should be around a tree and we should be celebrating this incredible Earth. And so happy Earth Day to all of you and everyone in the city of Sheboygan, the county of Sheboygan, state of Wisconsin, United States, North America and the whole world. And for those of you who want to learn more about Earth Day and how you can actually leave behind an Earth even better for the next generation, I strongly urge you to come to Meade Public Library and check out some wonderful resources on how you can really make a difference in your community. Next, I wanted to make the official announcement that in light of our most recent local election, all of us here on the board would like to wish former mayor Mike Van der Steen a very happy retirement. He was actually the fourth mayor that I've had the opportunity to work with while being on the library board. And he was very supportive of our library and he worked with me on getting some great appointments of citizens to our library board. So our best wishes are to him. And in light of this recent election, I would also like to congratulate on behalf of all of us, Ryan Sorensen as our new mayor of the city of Sheboygan. We look forward to working with him along with the new alders of Gracia Pirella and Amanda Salazar, as well as the reelection of alders Barb Feldy, Roberta Fulicki Paneski, Marcus Savaglio, and Trey Mitchell. Congratulations to all of them on behalf of our library board. And then the final piece of the announcements is I just wanted to remind all of you that if you are in the final cycle of your three year term, this will be your last meeting unless you are interested in being reappointed to the library board. If so, after this meeting, please get in touch with me so that I can share with you the process by which you can communicate those wishes with our new mayor. And I also wanted to let you know that in the month of May, for those of you who are relatively new to our board, in the month of May at our meeting, we actually have our own election where we determine the new president and vice president, as well as an opportunity to share which new committees you will become part of in this upcoming year. So I think that is it for all of my course on this announcements and common council reports. And I'm just gonna look over at library director Garrett Erickson to see if there's anything I've forgotten. All right, thank you very much. At this time, under 1.6, we are going to be adopting a resolution in honor of the service of Kyle Welton as made public library trustee. He communicated with us last month when we did not have a library meeting that he needed to step down from his term, primarily due to the work load that he has in his new professional endeavors. And so in working with Garrett Erickson, we have put together a resolution in honor of him. So at this time, I'm not too sure if this resolution had an opportunity to be shared on board docs, but I am going to share it with all of you now. And then it will be shared with you. And Kyle will have an opportunity to receive this resolution. So a resolution and recognition of the service of Kyle Welton to me public library. Whereas Kyle Welton was first appointed to the library board by Shaboygan Mayor, Mike Vandersen in April, 2017. Whereas Kyle Welton participated diligently as the finance committee chairperson. Whereas Kyle Welton helped guide the library through the COVID-19 pandemic. And whereas Kyle Welton was an advocate for me public library's vision of creating a vibrant, informed and cohesive community. Whereas Kyle Welton served as a model for the conduct of the responsibilities of a library trustee in a well-informed and reasoned manner. Excuse me. And whereas Kyle Welton took seriously his responsibilities as a board member and worked conscientiously for the benefit of the citizens of Shaboygan. And now therefore be it resolved that the me public library board does hereby publicly commend Kyle Welton for the time and attention he so generously devoted to his responsibilities as a trustee. The board thanks him for his commitment in serving as me public library trustee and recognizes his service through the designation of appropriate book titles for purchase in his honor. The me public library wishes him all the best following his service to the Shaboygan residence as a library trustee. Dated 22nd day of April, 2021. So at this time, would someone like to take a motion to approve this resolution? All right, Kathy Norman. Thank you. Kathy Norman has made the motion and I believe was that Chris who seconded? Yep. Second. Second. Any further discussion? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion carried. And as the tradition that was started a few years ago, I did actually purchase a couple of books as a thank you from all of us to Kyle. But with COVID it was kind of challenging to get books to come to the little local bookstore in Plymouth, bookheads. So there's a couple of titles that are not here but I did want to share the two that are here. So I thought it was most appropriate really for anyone on a board. Amanda Gorman's wonderful poem, The Hill We Climb. So I thought he would really appreciate her inaugural poem for our whole country. And then because I was thinking of poetry, I thought, well, we have to pick something of our own Cheboygan poet lawyer, Lisa Vijos. So I am including also this wonderful book, Van Gogh Dreams because maybe Kyle will have more time to actually dream if he doesn't also have the responsibilities of the Mead Public Library Board of Trustees. So these two will be going to him and then once the other books come in, I will let you know what he will be receiving. One has to do with a travel book. So you can tell that, you know, I think we're hoping that in this year and the next year we can actually plan for a little bit of travel. So all right, with that, we will move on then to committee reports and 2.1 review and possible action on payment of current expenditures, including payroll, special revenues, grants, gifts, and donation. And I'm just going to turn that over to Garrett, Erickson to see if there are any additional highlights that we should be aware of. So now we're just trying to see if we can get it right. There you go. I'm on. Thanks. Okay, I'm back on. This is just one technology, just real, it's flashing. So, going off. There it is, Maeve. Debbie did send out the information for the section on Monday. I guess I would open it up to Debbie if you had anything else to add or if there was questions from anyone? No, there weren't any donations this month and you did receive the 2020 fiscal year in and that is the final one unless the auditors would find something. But I believe it's going to be the final one because they haven't asked me any questions and I believe the audit's almost done. And then the 2021 that is through March. So if you have any questions on any of it, it's about where we should be after three months. So I guess my only question was that you had referenced to all of us that if there was any account that was at 100% or over, it's because of the way the finance department is not posting some things that are reoccurring and I was just curious just for my own understanding, is that, do you think that is going to be the new way that the report is going to be shared or will we be going back to the old way? I just need to make sure I'm reading the reports correctly every month. I'm so used to that 100%. That helps me feel like we're moving carefully through our monies throughout the year. Yeah, and actually I would prefer to be billed out every month, but the finance department is going to bill it out as a cash instead of like an accrual type accounting. So like the parking expense, which we always did get billed at one time, but the IT now used to be billed out monthly. That is going to be the one year expense right off the bat and a few of the others where you see that 100% and I do not foresee that changing with the new personnel. And I think also the city administrator talked it over with their interim finance director and that is going to be the route they're going to go. You know, I could take those contracts, some of those contracts we get billed in January and I could manually do them on a spreadsheet and then put them on, but I would prefer not to do that. I would like to just show the actual that's on our year to date budget. All right. Well, thank you Nancy, excuse me, Debbie, I was just seeing Nancy's, I thought Nancy was waving her hand. So if this is the case, it might be helpful at one of our next meetings to maybe we could just have a quick little review of what items should we be looking at and that maybe could be something we could do at a future finance committee meeting and that information can be shared then with the whole board just to help. Making sure that we're looking at, we need to be looking at and that way we're not asking you the same question every month. And you'll also notice that tax levy is not on the statement and I did check on that and I was told that the auditors have told them not to post that until August after the July 30th tax collection. So what I will do is I will manually put that in there, otherwise it is going to make us look like we're way over budget every month until August. And we all know how Debbie pays attention to any penny that is over budget. So we know it is harder for her to see that than perhaps all of us, but that's very good to know too. Thank you. Any other question or comment? Would someone like to make a motion to take action on this item? Someone like to move approval? Okay. Whoops. Sorry, Kathy. You're muted. Well, Kathy Norman didn't say so moved. Is there a second? I think Nancy is trying to say second. You wanted to do a two? I think she was muted. I am no longer muted and I will second. All right, terrific. Any further discussion? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion carries. Terrific. Next is 2.2, the 2021 budget status report. And I'm turning it over again to Garrett Erickson. And I will delegate to Debbie anything. I included that in with the last conversation. Yeah. The 2021, we don't. I guess, is there any questions on the report? I think it all looks as it normally does. So along with the additions and the clarifications you made earlier. So thank you, Debbie. I think we can now move on then to 3.1, which is foundation mini golf event. Yeah, thanks, Maeve. So on this one, most people knew that the pro golfer association rider cup was scheduled for the fall and unfortunately got delayed due to COVID. During the first six months of last year, we were planning a big event for the foundation. It was going to be a fundraiser where we had opened up the library on a Sunday. Of course, Sundays during the summer were closed and we planned on having mini golf over the course of a weekend. One day would be for families and one day would be just for adults. Unfortunately, we of course had to postpone that. And now the rider cup has been rescheduled here in September in Kohler at Whistling Straits, the weekend of September 24th through the 26th. And so the foundation is wondering, I guess they're still kind of going back and forth on whether to have an event. Things are starting to open up, but they really haven't been clearly opened by the CDC or state health department. And we would expect that we would have quite a few people in the building, so I thought I would bring that up to the attention of the trustees to kind of discuss whether they would want to do something or maybe delay it. And I just wanted to have a discussion today and kind of open that up and we could give some feedback to the foundation on that. So I'll share my thoughts first because I've talked with Garrett about this. My inclination is that as much as I love, love, love the idea of the foundation trying to create a fundraising event for the library in our library space, I just think that this year is a little too challenging with our challenges of COVID-19 to have an event inside our library that involves eating and drinking, and doing the mini golf and socializing and doing all the things that we enjoy doing, having almost like a different behavior protocol for a social event when we're open for the public. Normally, we have a very careful expectation of how people should conduct themselves and staying further apart and wearing a mask. I just think it sends out the wrong message even though I am so intrigued by this idea and it's one that I'd like the foundation to kind of put in their back pocket and maybe we can revisit this in two or three years. And it's my guess that we're gonna have some pretty amazing golf championships in Sheboygan County in the next few years. And I know the tie in with the rider is so perfect. I just don't think we can really put people at risk and really send the wrong message to our community with how careful we have been with this virus. So that's my viewpoint, but I would love to hear from other members to see what your thoughts are. It's Mary Lynn, sorry. They cut off my alter email with astonishing speed and it took me a while to figure out how to get the link to the meeting. And Ma'am, I'm trying to remember the discussion. Who are the intended people to come into the fundraiser? We were gonna open it up to the public in the evening. It was going to be, you know, people would buy so many like a ticket. There was a whole different way of how they could do that. And then all day long on Sunday, it would be families and we were gonna have food and beverages on each floor. I mean, we were thinking some of the holes might like there might be a certain cheese company that would like to have a special hole and maybe also give out some wonderful cheese along with. So we had grand ideas. And it was just the fact that we're involving that. Yeah, and it would not be challenging. We would not be trying to get the golfers or the participants or anybody to come in to the library, right? Correct. It would be just for, essentially for community people. Yes. Yeah. Okay, because we learned last time the golfers and all those folks are simply not, except to Stephanos, they're not gonna come into town. So, yeah. No, I would agree. I think it's just too weird right now. I think we probably need another six months to figure out what kind of spikes they're going to be if any, and it would be sad to do all the preparation and then have to call it off. Kind of my thought. Okay, thank you. Anyone else? And Kathy Norman, if I can get the right button. Okay. Okay. Yeah, well, if you could turn it back on you, turn it on and then don't touch it again. And then hopefully if I touch this, it'll turn red. Oh, it's not working. Sorry, everybody, there's technology here. All right, I'm gonna try again. Okay, all right. Yeah, when we looked at doing this last year, what really struck me is that this was gonna be an event that took a lot of community participation because each hole was gonna be done by a company, not to mention all the volunteers to set it up. And I'm thinking that this year, leading up to that event, the companies are gonna all be trying to figure out what the new normal is. I doubt any of them are gonna wanna commit to something like this in the state of uncertainty. So, yeah, it doesn't seem like a good year to do it. I think we should wait. Because it sounded nice to tie it in with a rider cup, but it'll still have its own legs in a future year. Thank you. Anyone else? Chris, Chris at her hand. Oh, sorry, Chris. I was just gonna say that most of the children, 16 and under, are not gonna be vaccinated by September either. And since they'll be part of the families coming in, that will present a problem as well. Another good point. Thank you. So, anyone else? So, Garrett, does this kind of give you a sense of where the board is? And so, Kathy and I being the liaison on the foundation, we will also kind of convey these comments to the foundation members when we next meet. Thank you. I appreciate the feedback. Moving on then, 3.2, the DPI Inclusive Services Assessment and Guide. And so, we did send this out about a week ago, and what the step was is that Melissa, Cheryl, and I worked through this long document and took or put, documented the answer to each question to the best of our ability. A few of these questions could be interpreted multiple ways, I guess. And so, my thought was though, that we would sort of go through this section by section, just see if people on the board had questions about anything or comments, and then perhaps at the end, the board sort of direct us to go back and look at certain sections to see what we should be really looking at. I think as part of our strategic plan, Melissa has been leading a group of staff who are working on an operations plan, and we do some of this work, but as you can see, if you've gone through the document, there's a lot more than just the operations. There's a lot that the board does as well and so on. So, it's kind of a wide-ranging document. So, I thought I would start with governance. As people read through this section, did anything strike you as wrong or something that we should be working on? Yeah. Nancy. Item two, does the library board reflect the demographics of the community? I wondered if you could mark that as in progress as new board members are added. It seems like that's been a goal, but that you could call it in progress, but I'm not sure how you see that. I think that could be in progress as well. I know Maeve and Mike Van der Steen worked most of last year trying to find people from different demographic groups and we just weren't having a lot of luck. So, certainly that one could be marked in progress though. So, as I said, some of these could be interpreted different ways. Thank you. Yeah, you bet, Nancy. Other comments on the governance section? Well, then moving along, we'll go into administration as page eight. Questions or comments on this section? I'll share it if I may. Yes, Marcus. Sorry, I was trying to unmute as you asked for questions on the previous section. Because it's governance and it pertains to how the people gathered here today. Deliberate these things. Do we have a plan to get some of these nos to in progress and to yes? Is there, what are we doing to bring governance? And I think it's germane for us to talk about it because we are named in this one. We are the people that are governance. What is our plan to get to yes? This is actually our first kick at this whole document, Marko. So we're trying, at this point, I think based on what our discussion is today, I need to come back with a plan. I think that's what I'm looking for, I guess, is some direction on what the board sees as the biggest needs based on this wide-ranging document. I'm just wondering, due to the length of the document, would it be helpful for our use of time here if we individually just sort of sent, like in each category, like areas that we think need more attention or would that be more helpful for this? Or perhaps as a conversation right now, which ones are more glaring that you want to make sure we're paying attention to? And it looks like Meg Elbrink has had her hand up. So go ahead, Meg. I think you ended up where I was thinking myself, Maeve. I wonder if we might benefit from getting kind of a summary report from the library staff on where areas of strength emerged in this assessment and where areas of question and areas of opportunity. Rather than going kind of line by line or section by section, I wonder if a summary would be helpful to us to kind of contextualize all of the things that our staff know and are working on in light of all of these very specific items. I certainly can do that, but then I feel like I'm the student giving myself a grade. So I can come back next month with that, Meg, but it would be helpful as well to get feedback from the board just to know what you guys think. So I can certainly chime in what the managers think, certainly. Can I just jump in? This is Melissa. If you go to page 30, there is a scoring rubric that summarizes all of the sections. If you kind of want to get that more bird's eye view on how we rank in the different sections rather than line by line. And I think that maybe gives us a clearer idea of the areas that particularly need work. Okay. Got the... Thank you, Melissa. So when I looked at this document, and this was, I think, back in February when you had first shared it, and I know that we've all looked at it since, for me, it underscored just how much more we need to do. And then it also made me think too, just like for where it says, the physical design of our library, what that does too. So I guess from my perspective, it being able to share with you where we think, where we think the board needs to work and then also to being able to share our perspective with administration and staffing, correct? Mm-hmm. So, oh, look, Nancy. Yes. Would it be helpful if we shared our questions or comments with you, Garrett? Not now, but to help you with the report out, similar to when I looked at and the item that I referred to. I think it would... Would that be helpful? Sure, sure. Absolutely. And maybe in addition to that, just areas, I mean, you can see on this section one seems to be the weakest area as far as the document goes. Yeah. But yeah, just giving me any sort of feedback, whether it was a question about how we answered something or whether there was just something that we need to focus on, I think anyone that can give me feedback would be very welcomed. Okay. Looks like Meg Aubrey. Thanks. And Melissa, I very much appreciate you guiding us to the summary at the end. I think that's helpful. I think what I'm also thinking about though are like cross-cutting themes. Like, are we seeing that our language is... Our policies are good, but our language isn't up to date regardless of which section we're looking at, or are we seeing that our kind of representation is a challenge. So obviously when we look at all of these different categories, those become themes across categories as well as items within categories. So I think that's where I was wondering if even just some general summary from the library staff would help us see where areas of opportunity emerged as you completed the document. We'll certainly do that, Meg. I know representation is going to be the big one for us, but we'll put something in writing for next meeting. So as far, oh, Marcos. Go ahead, Marcos. Oh, yeah, thanks everybody. So Garrett, I want to clarify that it didn't mean to push the work of planning on you, especially the governance section given that we are the governance. I'd like to move to conform on the ad hoc committee to deal with that section specifically as a board in lending it the importance that the governance should have in our results and how we move forward. I think that is a wonderful idea because I was just thinking that we each have our own perspective on how we're doing with governance, but that's still not the collective knowledge and understanding of our full board. And we need to know what we each think. Because when I look at governance, I just see that we have a lot of work to do. And so, you know, like for instance, just having things in braille, I mean, just there are just so many pieces that I hadn't even thought of until I actually looked at this questionnaire. So I think that would be an excellent idea. Is there anyone, and I'm just assuming that Marcos is interested in this ad hoc committee, would there be any other board member who would be interested because we can certainly put together an ad hoc committee to do a little bit more deliberate work on this to be able to work with our administration to find out where are we now and where do we wanna go and then how are we gonna get to that endpoint? I think that's a fantastic idea, Marcos. So, and the question I wanted to ask Melissa and Garrett, do you have a particular deadline by which you want to have this completed, you know, because is there a certain deadline that we're working towards to get all of this information and this new plan together? There really isn't a hard deadline. It's just something we wanted to do last year and we got delayed and it is part of our strategic plan as well. So this was just one of the tools we had to move in that direction, so, but no hard deadlines. Great. All right, any other questions or comments? All right, I thought this was a very helpful discussion. If anything, it tells us it's not easy and that, you know, Garrett was, you know, was not going to in five minutes hear from all of us and be able to check it off his list. So that's a good thing. We're gonna spend some good time on this particular topic. So I will get back to all of you on the formation of ad hoc committee and if any of you are interested, you can contact me after the meeting. So thank you. Anything else? Nope, that's it on that one. Terrific. Then 3.3, COVID service responses. So we do have quite a bit under this agenda item. The first was just staff immunization. So that was a concern. I wanted to thank Maeve for contacting the local health department. The library staff were not designated to a certain group, even though the CDC had designated library staff as in the same boat, so to speak, as educators and childcare workers. Somehow the state of Wisconsin did not classify us. However, we did learn that some local health departments were specifically taking library workers and putting them into that group with educators. And Maeve went to the local health department and lobbied as well as talked to Adam Payne. And lo and behold, the next day we were told that we could go get scheduled for immunization. So that was wonderful. Since that happened several weeks ago, all of the staff that wanted to get immunized did to my knowledge. Everyone was offered time slots and I think everyone that wanted one was able to get scheduled. And so we're in really good shape for that. To be honest, I think the morale did go up slightly because of that. People felt a little bit safer having been immunized. So that was a wonderful thing and thank you Maeve. Then moving on, we are going through several changes as we do start to reopen services. A few things coming up that you should know of. We are stopping the quarantine of materials as the CDC and other health organizations have stated it's really not a surface transmission type of virus. It's mostly through the air and the DPI has now stated that libraries can again start just going ahead and pushing their materials without a quarantine period. So that we're planning on switching that out on May 3rd, we'll stop quarantining for 24 hours that should help the materials get circulated a little bit faster. It also helps with the process just in the staff's process and making things go faster, a little more efficient. So that's a good thing. We're also looking at opening up newspapers again, that whole surface transmission when this first went down. We sort of locked down a lot of the materials that people were touching a lot, essentially. So magazines, newspapers and so on. Newspapers are gonna get open back up on May 3rd as well so that we do have a bunch of die-hard newspaper readers that will be super happy when that happens. I've actually got a complaint within the last week on that asking when we're gonna do it. So it's time, I think, and people will be excited about that. Another piece that we're opening up very soon here within a month is the meeting spaces, at least the large meeting rooms. We're going to be doing that within the guidelines of six feet and a limited number of people within the rooms. So we'll go 25% of what the capacities are. We'll be the maximum, but we have gotten requests from groups to start opening up those areas and we would like to help them start meeting again. So it will be limited, still limited, but at least some of those organizations can begin meeting again. And then moving ahead, Melissa's goal for summer. Normally, traditionally at Labor Day and at Memorial Day, we change our hours from summer to winter and winter to summer. And on Memorial Day, we were planning on going back to summer hours. We are planning on going back to our normal summer hours after Memorial Day. So that would actually bump our hours up a little bit compared to where they are right now. So we'll open slightly earlier and so on, be open a little bit later. And so I think the public will welcome that as well. The last topic is something I wanted to actually have more of a discussion about with the board as opposed to report, but with the mask issue. Obviously at the state level now, there is the Supreme Court of the states truck down the Evers mask mandate. At this point, the city still has a mask mandate for city buildings. However, I do have a concern. What would happen if the city went away from that? And I don't have any indication that they are, but I guess I'd like to have a talk with the trustees about what should I be thinking about if the city did indeed move away from that, what would be the desire of the trustees? Maeve has already talked to me about children not having been immunized. And so that's a big concern of ours, having everybody in a building together, especially with a lot of the children that come in that wouldn't be immunized. So I guess I just wanted to open that up and get some feedback on how I should act if what sort of mandate we should do if the city went away with their mask mandate. It looks like Kathy Norman would like to speak. Yeah, I would, I'm sorry, Kathy, it looks like it went off again. There we go. Okay, I think for some reason, that particular mic is having difficulty. Do you want to go to the mic next to try again? It says it's right here. And then for some reason that it turns off right away. So, and now of course the other one are both on for you now. Yeah. I think the CDC guidelines are what we should follow even if the city removes it because I know that's a lot of businesses in the area are doing. They're determining when they can remove the mask mandate. It takes it out of the subjectivity and politics and opinions and just follows what the CDC is saying. And right now of course they're still saying you should, if you're indoors you should absolutely be wearing a mask. Thank you. Anyone else would like to share their thoughts in regards to continuing the mask mandate if the city were to make a decision for their city buildings. Just due to the fact that our building is used by the public in a different manner than the city, the other city buildings. Maryland Donahue. Well, first of all, I would hope that Todd and other administrators would be in touch with you before any decision was made Garrett. And I would just take the position that you're running the library, they are not and those are your rules. And I don't think there'll be, there's still many businesses and so forth that really require a mask when you come in. And so I think Kathy's advice about following the CDC guidelines, you know, which I know can move around a bit but I still think it's just the smart way to go. And I don't see that being a big problem. Right. Thank you. The comment that Garrett shared at the beginning because he and I have been talking about this quite a bit. I think just in light of the fact that our, the population that comes in our door is a population that does not have a vaccine available for them. It gives us a different perspective on what rules we need to put in place to keep our staff and our patrons safe. So not all city buildings have, you know, hundreds and hundreds of people coming in every day. And so I think that allows us a little bit of a difference of opinion of what we need to do. But I agree with you Mary Lynn that I think the decision that we make, I think will be supported by our city just because they know we have a different population that we're dealing with on a daily basis. So thank you. Does that give you the feedback that you need? Okay. I appreciate that. Wonderful. Next we're moving on right to the director's report, 4.1. So the Wisconsin Association of Public Libraries is a really good conference for talking about programs and facilities management and all the nitty-gritty things that public libraries do in the state. They also do have... Maybe if we need a microphone. Oh shoot. My microphone's off again. We are having interesting technical difficulties. I'm back on though. Thank you for pointing that out. Thank you. I should be looking for my red lights there. Mary Lynn, you're a pro at this. I'd imagine. You could start at the beginning if you're sorry. So the Wisconsin Association of Public Libraries will be meeting on May 4th through the 7th in a couple of weeks here. It's a super good conference for talking about operations in libraries, but as well as there are trustee discussions that would be beneficial to trustees. And so I just wanted to make you aware, if you go to wisconsinlibraries.org and then click on events and conferences and then the WAPL, it's called WAPL conference, you can take a look at the schedule. It's about $115 for, it's about three and a half day long conference. Obviously you don't have to attend the whole thing, but for anyone that's interested, we do have some money set aside and certainly trustees would be welcome to sit in on that conference. I think it's a really good conference since it's all focused for public libraries. So I would just say go to the website, take a look at it. And if you're interested in attending, let myself or maybe Debbie DeAmico know and we'll try to get you signed up. Thank you. The next thing on the agenda, 4.2, we're gonna turn that over to Melissa to talk about services and programming. Hi everyone, this is Melissa. I just wanted to mention too, in regards to the WAPL conference that Eric Kleinberg is one of the keynote speakers. If you recall, he's the one who wrote palaces for the people that we read as a group last, was that last year or two years ago? I don't know, 2020 is a blur. So I think that should be super interesting. So real quick, some program update. I'm sorry, I was just gonna say as well, Cheryl Nessman will be speaking at one of the speakers at the conference. She'll be presenting on the bed bug room and talking about it's really, no one has done anything like that. So that was a brilliant idea on her part to cut down on the processing. So with that, I'm sorry, Melissa, thank you. No problem. So program updates, we continue to have really great success with our virtual programs and take home kits. Those just go out really fast, faster than we can even keep up with. And then to highlight a couple of really successful programs, Wintergreen, which you might be familiar with. We've been doing that for I think four years now. As a seasonal transition from winter to spring, we do a full day of programs around planning your garden, upcycling, cooking, all kinds of stuff like that. And it's a really well-loved program. We have a lot of community partners as well as community members that really look forward to it. So we decided to try it virtual this year and it was very successful. We had over 800 participants throughout the various virtual workshops that we hosted, which is pretty incredible. The only one who gets those kind of numbers is Lil Rev for our other virtual programs. So that's pretty exciting. And then I just wanted to mention too that there's a new statewide committee that has just been formed through Wills. And that is the Wisconsin Library Service. The committee is called the City Library Collective. And that is any single municipal libraries that serve a population of between 30 and 100,000 people. And that includes Sheboygan, Manitowoc, Appleton, Fond du Lac, Oshkosh, Beloit, Racine, Kenosha, Superior, La Crosse, and Eau Claire. And they had their first meeting earlier this month. And really what it's designed to do is kind of share ideas and work through collective problems together, the kinds of things that libraries like us face are often not the same thing that the libraries like in our systems face. So these are also mostly resource libraries where like us in the Monarch system where significantly larger than the other libraries. So it's really hard to collaborate when the services we're providing and the issues we're facing are just so different. So this helps us kind of manage that and find ideas from other libraries that are facing the same issues that we are. So we had a really productive first meeting where we decided that our initial focus would be to go after some of the ARPA money in the form of a grant that is framed around libraries as community recovery centers post pandemic. And this is actually based on a grant that Milwaukee Public Library wrote in an attempt to get some CARES Act funding. They ultimately did not get the grant but the grant that they wrote is fantastic. So we're basing the initial project off of that. And the idea is, is we're gonna try to as a group agree on three areas to focus on for the grant funding and then individual libraries can add additional areas of focus onto that. So just to give you an idea of the direction that's moving in and this has been sort of led by the director in Kenosha. So one thing would be getting kids back on track academically and socially after the traumatic school year that they've had, fighting disinformation and community reconciliation through social justice and community engagement activities. But there's also some ideas for including like designing for a flexible future, basically planning for the next pandemic and other disasters that will be coming our way. So moving towards a model of community resilience as opposed to just traditional disaster planning if that makes sense. And the piece that libraries play in doing that for communities. So I'll certainly be updating the board as this group continues and let you know what the progress is. But it's really exciting I think and a great opportunity for me to have four Wisconsin libraries in general. So unless there's questions, those are my updates. Now that sounds very, very interesting and I can only imagine the number of ideas that are becoming from all those different types of resource libraries. It's a really great idea that everyone's getting together on these topics. So I'll continue with the director's report on 4.3. Cheryl Nessman's not able to attend today. However, the big thing that her staff, the shelving group is working on is really changing up their processes now. They've got, as I said, the quarantine period will be going away. They are working on, there's an issue right now with our computer system with notifications. We still want to put the materials into that heated room for a period. But what happens when the material comes in and is checked in on our sorter, there's an automatic notification that goes out. And so patrons are expecting their stuff to be on the shelf as soon as that notification comes out. And unfortunately we want to take that time to heat the books up. So there's some work that Cheryl's really trying to get done in that area. And with the quarantine changing as well, we're just trying to work through some process changes. So that's really what she's been spending some time on lately. Update on building projects. This is Greg Hurr, one of my staff's area. So he's got a list of things. When you go into board docs and you click on that particular agenda item, there's a list of a dozen or so items. We've been making it through quite a few of the projects. The big one this last week that was completed was, as you can see for those folks that have come to the library in the last week, we've got a new steel fence on the, it would be the northwest as well as the southwest corners of the building. And so Maeve has been on me for a couple of years to cover up that ugly generator, beautiful generator really from Kohler, but we do have a fence around that now as well as towards the back of the library. There's a heat grate that has also been covered up with a fence now too. So that's in the loading dock area. So both of those projects are done. And speaking of Earth Day, I have one other one that we want to talk about that I haven't talked about before, which is our maintenance staff has been slowly changing us over the whole building to LED lighting. And so there are about 75% of the way through on that project. In fact, we have a whole slew of light bulbs that we're trying to figure out what's the least costly way to get rid of those. But they have been working through this huge project. You can imagine we have an 88,000 square foot building. There's a lot of light bulbs to go through. And so they've been really working on that project. So it's exciting to see that almost coming to the end as well. So that hopefully saves us some money as well as it does our part for Earth Day. And then the last item would be the monthly statistics. And on that, as I was thinking about, looking at the statistics, so there's still obviously several that are way down. This is going to be the transition month. Now last year was about the year this part of the year was about the time we shut down and we were actually shut down all the way for a number of weeks. And so I would expect as now the year starts to drag on we're going to see these numbers start to go up in certain areas such as library visits, internet usage and our physical checkout of items. All those should start to go up now that we've been open back up and last year we're closed down. So that's a good thing. There's still going to be some that we're really not doing much of right now. We're not doing a lot of programs. We're not going to be using the study rooms at this time yet. We're still working through that. And Sydney is really not recruiting volunteers at this time. We're still working under the premise that we don't want to bring in a lot of people into the library. So some of these will stay sort of slow but some of the things are opening up a little bit. So we should start to see those numbers start to go up again. Great. Any questions or comments for Garrett? Thank you for the report. Moving on then to 5.1, Nancy mentioned any updates from the Monarch library system? The executive director, Kimberly Young, resigned from her position and the job description is out and we'll be receiving applications until I think it's May 8th. So hopefully in summertime there will be that position will be filled. Staff is helping out as they've done before to keep things going. And the committees of the Monarch system are at work looking at their policies and employee handbook to update and revise as needed. So that's it from the library, the Monarch system right now. Great. Thank you for that update. Do you know if the Monarch system is using a search firm for the new? Yes. The executive board did decide to hire a search firm for that position. Perfect. I know that they were thinking about it because I had received a call from one of the board members to find out about the firm that we utilized to search for our library director. So thank you. Good. And actually maybe it is the same firm. It's the same firm. Fantastic. Oh yeah, good to know. Yeah. I think we're kind of happy with our library director. So, you know. Perfect. All right. Thank you for that update. The Mead Library Foundation. I'm gonna turn this over to Kathy. Okay. The foundation board is moving to an every other month meeting, which is a step in the right direction. We've had a strange schedule. We used to be every month. Then we went to sort of on again, off again in the summer. Now we're trying to get into a new groove every other month. The last time we met, we spent a lot of time talking about whether the normal activities that the foundation usually does are gonna happen this year. And there are things like the author visit that we had scheduled and called off, the Renaissance Society Gala in December. And I don't think we've reached any definitive decisions on all of that. The investments that the foundation are managing, both for the endowment of the foundation, as well as the library board, the former 850 funds are doing well. That's one of our main functions is managing that money. So funds are available when the library needs something special or something extra beyond its normal budget amount. And the Strategic Planning Committee, or I should say the Public Affairs Committee is meeting to discuss how to better market the library through the foundation channel, whether it's through their own website, rather just a link from the library board or the library website. And John Donovan seems to be kind of spearheading that discussion and that endeavor. So we'll be doing some work on our website presence. And that's all. Thank you for that update. And then the friends of Mead Public Library. I'm hoping that Sydney will be able to give us an update. I hope so too. Can everybody hear me? Yep. So the friends met yesterday. They are working towards a couple of different events later on in the year. Nothing real concrete yet, but they're really hoping to kind of get more of a social gathering together for the friends members. So we're looking at a couple of different things there. The Friends Executive Committee did meet and put together actually kind of dovetailing off of the foundation's thank-a-thon that they did that last month. And they put together a thank-you letter for all of the friends members, which they sent out and was very well received. We just had our book sale last week, our annual book sale. And the book sale brought in $3,314.80, which is awesome. It is the fourth largest sale amount since the record was started in 2006, which is awesome. Wow. Lastly, the friends do a spring campaign to support the summer library program called The Gift of Reading. And those letters went out in early April as well, which also has done phenomenally this year where the letters are still coming in, but we have so far $3,680. And I believe, Debbie, correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the friends pledge $2,500 every year. So we're well over that mark, which is really nice. And that's all I got. If I could jump in, Maeve, I just wanted to say that the friends book sale was incredible. It seemed like it was back to old times pre-COVID, and we had way more people than we expected. I also wanted to thank the friends for prior to that they had, they call it a garage sale, but they helped the library get rid of old equipment that we can't find other buyers for. So they opened up the Roku Room and sold some desks and file cabinets and that sort of the thing. And they really helped us start to clear out some of our areas that need to be cleared out. We have a lot of stuff sitting around when we had brought in new office equipment and office furniture and so on. And that really helped us to get rid of some of this stuff. So thanks to the friends. And if I could just echo what Garrett just said, Sydney, if you could please convey to the friends how much we appreciate their hard work. It is amazing to me that they made over $3,000 in a book sale where the books cost 10 cents or 25 cents. So it is just astonishing. And I do know that there were some lovely donations from the collection of Bernie Markovitch because several friends of mine said that they were lucky to get one of his lovely books with his name inside. So it was a really wonderful event that was put together. It was so safe the way you orchestrated people in and out and just as Garrett said, it felt like old times but it was done in such a safe manner. And yet they still made incredible amounts of money for their annual events. So thank them. I will do that. Thank you. And before I get to the last item, which is the upcoming meetings, which will be in May, I just wanted all of us to sort of give a round of applause to Mary Lynn Donahue who will no longer be our liaison. She has been our liaison for several years and after nine years on Common Council of which she would be sitting up here. She has given such an incredible service to our city and to our library. And so if you could just join me in a round of applause, no matter where you are in which room around the city. So, and I did tell her that I would like for her to come back next month for a resolution that will remain secret until then. So hope we get to see her again. So at this time, our next meeting is May 27th. At this time, would someone like to make a motion to adjourn? So moved. Been moved. Is there a second? I'll second. All right. Been moved and seconded. Any further discussion? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. And I can already tell. The meeting is adjourned. The meeting is adjourned. The meeting is adjourned. The meeting is adjourned. The meeting is adjourned.