Library District has fallout with its Friends

By Joe Schoenmann

Thursday, May 22, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Although they don’t agree on much else on the subject, the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District and a group that for 34 years has supported it concede that the squabble between them is in no way worth the $44,000 in legal fees they have spent fighting each other.

Both sides seem stunned that a sit-down and some talk didn’t solve the problem months ago.

The Library District wanted an audit and a contract. The Friends of Southern Nevada Libraries took offense, viewing that as an implied questioning of integrity. The library system chief then halted deliveries of books to the Friends that the group sells to raise money — for the library.

And then lawyers got involved.

Ask either side about the fight’s origins and you’ll get what appears to be no good reason.

The Friends feel they’ve been handled rudely by the district, especially given that they have raised millions of dollars for it over the years.

From the library system’s perspective, the Friends have acted childishly and unprofessionally, getting their backs up over a reasonable request to properly account for the large sums of money involved.

Harsh words, even a nose-to-nose confrontation in the hallway of a library, all seem to stem from this: The Friends of Southern Nevada Libraries openly accused the library board of a power grab after the Library District asked to audit the Friends’ financial books.

The district says that’s preposterous.

Since July, the Friends, who stopped volunteering in mid-March, have donated $180,000 to the Library District, according to a district spokeswoman. In 2007, Friends board member Teri Reynolds said the group donated $279,000.

The money is earned through what the Friends euphemistically call “stores.” The Library District has 13 libraries in urban Las Vegas and another 11 in outlying areas, from Laughlin to Goodsprings.

Volunteers oversee a few shelves in the libraries, “bookstores,” as they are called, stocked with books and items donated to the Library District or books discarded by the district. (For the past two months, library employees have run the stores — poorly, as far as the Friends are concerned.)

The money has grown over the years because volunteers are diligent about keeping shelves stocked, moving books and paying attention to customer needs, said Reynolds, the payroll manager for a Strip casino.

To price books, she and others check Amazon.com or other Internet book sites, find comparable books, then price the stores’ offerings at a 75 percent to 80 percent discount. The system is running so well that board member Tom Atava told the Library District board the book sales were totaling $7,200 a week.

That’s real money — real enough that in December, Library District Executive Director Dan Walters asked for an audit.

To Reynolds and other Friends, the suggestion of an audit and a contract to etch in stone the Friends’ deal with the district was insulting.

“We’ve worked all these years together and no one ever needed an audit,” she said, adding that she called around to “friends of library” groups across the nation and found very few with written contracts.

She’s not against a contract, she added. But the way it came about and what they call Walters’ “strong-arm” tactics put the Friends on the defensive.

In recalling how the district stopped the supply of books to library stores in December, she chokes up — evidence, perhaps, of the tender passions of a group dedicated to the dissemination of books and the support of libraries.

Walters is unrelenting when the question is put to him: Given that these are volunteers devoted to libraries, to books, in hindsight, might he have handled the matter more delicately?

Some of the Friends are retired businesspeople who should have seen the audit request for what it was without reading deeper, sinister motives into it, Walters said. All he asked for was “a mechanical demonstration of the accounting of funds” — hardly justification, he says, for a threat from one of the Friends to perhaps take the money raised through the group’s efforts to another, more deserving group.

“It’s a disgrace that an organization called the Friends of the Library has suggested that funds raised through the sale of materials would be given to other agencies,” he said.

As for a “power grab,” Walters said: “I don’t understand what there is to grab.”

“We’re a $70 million municipal corporation. We simply have an obligation to demonstrate to the public that the funds are allocated from the taxes we collect in an appropriate manner. I asked for an accounting of what has been done, and a contract that confirms what has been done. I didn’t ask ... for any fundamental change in the way they were doing things.”

The district hired Lionel Sawyer & Collins, one of Nevada’s largest firms, to compel the Friends to audit their books and to get a judge to declare that money raised by the Friends cannot be given to any other entity.

The Friends hired local lawyer Barry Levinson, who did not return a call for comment. Walters, however, said the Friends have filed a counterclaim, asking that they be given discarded library books “in perpetuity.”

Both sides hope a judge will decide the matter during a June 9 court date, but the fight has cost both sides — emotionally and financially. From mid-March through April 30, the Library District spent $31,010 in legal fees and the Friends, about $13,000.

Spending book money on lawyers “sickens” Reynolds.

Ironically, even as the dispute drags on, the Friends’ board is giving in to the district’s demand for an audit — albeit too late for the Library District. The group hired an auditor, at an expected cost of $10,000, and expects to have a report by the end of June. To date, it also has not given away any of the money from book sales to other organizations.

“I would desperately love to sit down and hash this out, get it over with,” Reynolds said, her voice shaking. “That won’t happen. Now we all just want to see that audit to show them. Maybe we don’t do everything right, but we certainly aren’t doing anything bad.”

It’s something she, and Walters, wish they had said to each other $44,000 ago.