The Hall County Library Board voted to change a few bylaws, as well as revise some policies, at its meeting this week.
The bylaw changes included the rotation of board members, vacancies and quorums, and the public speaking at meetings.
"I think it was two years ago now, we had five board members scheduled to rotate off at the same time," said Library Director Lisa MacKinney. This rotation conflicted with another section of the bylaws, so the county attorney recommended adding language to keep a member a little longer if the situation happened again, and MacKinney said that language was added "so that we could solicit volunteers from the board who would be rotating off to stay on for another one to two years to fix that leadership gap we would be facing if we had too many board members off at the same time."
The bylaw on vacancies and quorums clarified that if there are vacancies on the board, the amount needed for a quorum would change. Currently, 10 people sit on the board and six are needed for a quorum.
The bylaw regarding citizen comment was to clarify that if someone showed up the day of the meeting, their comments needed to be regarding items on the agenda, with a limit of two minutes per speaker.
The policies revised included removing the audiovisual equipment policy due to redundancy, cleaning up language regarding time sheets and the six month working test for employees, updating the exhibits and public information notices policies, and policies regarding children left in the library.
One change to the children's policy was specifying the ages of children who can be left in programs alone, as well as whether the caregiver needed to be in the library or just the building.
"We do have one facility, which is North Hall, with them being in the North Hall building they could be a very, very long ways away from their child because of the size of that building," said MacKinney. They also changed the language from supervisor to caregiver.
There was also a liability statement added that the library staff wouldn't be responsible for children leaving the premises. "We can't legally detail a child, because we don't know," said MacKinney, but she also said that if a child was in obvious distress, they would be allowed intervene.
MacKinney told the board the recommendations on policy changes came from committees formed while employees were working from home.
The changes to the bylaws and the policy revisions were approved unanimously.
