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Politics & Government

Lame Duck Library Board Accepts Board President's Resignation

Despite incoming members' protest, board appoints a new member to replace David Levin.

The mostly lame-duck Board of Trustees appointed a new member Thursday night, despite a public request by the four incoming board members that the decision be deferred until they take office.

Christa Quinn will serve the remaining four years of David Levin’s six-year term.

Board President Levin resigned from the board April 6, one day after an election in which four incoming board members, running under the party name B-PAC, swept out four incumbents. The board has seven members.

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Citing both a busy professional schedule and his distaste for the agenda of the incoming board members, Levin’s letter said work commitments would have kept him from four of the next six meetings.

“This coupled with the fact that the library board has a newly elected majority of individuals who have committed themselves to halting decades of progress made by the library suggests that now is the appropriate time for me to re-allocate my limited free time and energy to other causes,” he wrote.

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For many, the contentious election turned on whether Morton Grove should seek to build a new library, a proposal supported by the board members who lost the election.

Saying he spoke for all of the incoming board members, one of them, Paul Berg, asked that the board not appoint Levin’s replacement. They did so anyway in executive session, citing an Illinois law that says they should appoint a new member “forthwith.”

Berg expressed disgust with the move afterwards.

“If you look at our political system, nobody likes lame duck sessions,” he said. “The vanquished party should probably step back and allow the process to proceed.”

The meeting was the last for Bernadette Fahy, Laura Frisch, Larry Levin, and Renee Miller, in addition to David Levin.

Asked to comment Thursday night on the election results, Frisch said "there was a lot of misinformation out there" during the campaign.

Newly elected members Berg, Catherine Peters, Mark Albers and David Calimag will take office May 12.

A few other local residents were in attendance at Thursday's meeting, including Cheryl Noll, who voted for the incoming trustees and said B-PAC stands for “better people are coming.”

“We’re tired of being railroaded and it happens over and over,” Noll said. “We don’t get to say where our tax dollars go.”

No information was immediately provided about Quinn, except to say she was well-qualified, a mother of two and held a prominent public position. An internet search turned up a Christa Vogt Quinn on Facebook, whose interests included Friends of Morton Grove Library and PROLibrary Morton Grove, the party name that the defeated incumbent candidates used in their election. It lists her employer as Proctor and Gamble.

She could not be reached immediately by phone.

In other library board business, Library Director Ben Shapiro said Morton Grove is the first northern Illinois library to sign up for a new iPhone app that lets patrons renew books, search the library catalog, and do anything else they could do by phone.

He said the library is also testing a new technology that would allow people to use smartphone images of their library card’s barcode in place of the card itself.

Following the board’s executive session, it also unanimously voted to release the minutes of five previous executive sessions and to hold back the minutes from the Jan 12, 2010 meeting in which a personnel matter was discussed.

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