TRL trustees visit Hoquiam Timberland Library for Q&A

Published 1:30 am Friday, May 15, 2026

Editor’s note: The Daily World will publish part two of this discussion on Timberland Regional Library —“TRL Board of Trustees visits McCleary Library” on Tuesday.

With Timberland Regional Library [TRL] trustees meeting with the Centralia TRL Friends of Library on April 10, it was the Hoquiam and Aberdeen Friends of the Library groups turn to host the trustees in Grays Harbor County.

On the afternoon of May 12, TRL trustees Dustin Loup [Grays Harbor County] and Toni Gwin [Pacific County], along with East Grays Harbor District Manager Tania Remmers and West Grays Harbor District Manager Evi Buell, spent more than an hour at the Hoquiam Timberland Library updating and answering questions from community members.

TRL’s five-member Board of Trustees has been at the center of a firestorm involving a budget crisis and attempts to rectify a projected $3.8 million shortfall. In addition to cutting approximately $2.2 million in books, materials, programs, paid performers and training/conferences for library staff, TRL management prepared to lay off 61 frontline workers. After emotional and, at times heated, public outcry and negative media attention, TRL Executive Director Cheryl Heywood resigned and the planned layoffs were scaled back.

In attendance at the meeting were Hoquiam City Administrator Brian Shay, Aberdeen City Administrator Ruth Clemens, Aberdeen Community Development Director Lisa Scott, and former editor and publisher of The Daily World John C. Hughes. Kylie McQuarrie, co-founder of the Patron Coalition for Local Libraries, also made the trip from Hoodsport for the meeting.

After introductions, Loup and Gwin provided a recap of recent events and an update on the search for an interim executive director. Three interviews were scheduled for Tuesday evening and an offer was expected to be made this week.

Loup and Gwin indicated that steps are being taken to ensure that financial calamities would not happen again, an assessment of controversial facility “refreshes” would be undertaken and committees were being formed to address finances, workplace culture and a levy lid lift campaign to increase property tax revenue. However, Loup and Gwin said that committees are a challenge with a five-member board — only two people can serve on any given committee because three would constitute a quorum. Currently, there are two empty seats on the TRL Board of Trustees.

Lilly Pomeroy, president of the Friends of the WH Abel Memorial Timberland Library in Montesano, asked about the process for finding and hiring an interim executive director.

“We’re doing some pretty open-ended questions to find out what we can about the person, and we’re looking for stability, leadership under uncertainty, mission alignments, communication, somebody who can step in immediately.” Gwin said. “We have a leadership vacuum, so the questions are things like how do you build trust with staff and stakeholders when your role is temporary? Tell us about a time you had to stabilize an organization quickly. What did you do first? What did you do last? What would success look like for you at the end of this interim period? How do you handle internal conflict and low morale? How do you prepare TRL for the next permanent CEO? Those are the kinds of questions that we have.”

Gwin added that the interim executive director would also have the opportunity to apply for the permanent position.

Clemens asked if financial experience is a requirement for the interim or permanent executive director.

“We are prioritizing, if we can, the financial expertise of that interim director but also recognizing they’ll need to work with whoever’s in that position for leading the finance department,” Loup said. “But they’ll be a part of it. Ultimately it’s in close coordination with the finance department.”

At this point, Gwin revealed that TRL Finance Administrator Paige Preston has tendered her resignation effective June 15.

McQuarrie turned the focus to workplace culture and eight of the pending layoffs, which are set to proceed for probationary employees or disciplinary reasons.

“We have a list of all of the things that people have been disciplined for, and they include things like spending too much time talking to patrons and not spending enough time talking to patrons. Insubordination is something that is frequently cited as a reason staff are disciplined, which is an insane thing to say about a library,” McQuarrie said. “And with the probationary cutoff date, it was arbitrary. You had people who are just three weeks away from meeting their deadline of being here for a year, including some people who had been subs for two years and had just worked there part-time for a year. And relatedly, with dealing with the toxic workplace culture, when you’re aware that there is one, moving forward with these layoffs seems ‘hashtag’ problematic when it’s already been acknowledged that the staff culture and morale are so negative.”

McQuarrie continued to say that “… when there’s such a toxic culture and such a level of distrust, and when these layoffs are still scheduled to go through, when everybody kind of agrees that they’re at the very least unfair, is there any possibility of looking harder at those jobs and pausing the layoffs?”

Gwin responded, “You’re asking us to answer a question that we can’t publicly answer yet because it is in negotiation.”

The discussion turned to finding an interim executive director who could balance financial duties with managing people and relationships.

After describing the volatility with TRL revenue and reiterating the financial challenges TRL faces, Loup said, “So there’s, speaking for myself, looking for, and certainly in the permanent director, but also in the interim, [someone who will] definitely have a positive impact on the culture and be a people person.”

As the meeting progressed, Remmers and Buell assured the audience that Grays Harbor library patrons would not see much of an impact in programming in the coming months.

“We’re not looking at enormous impacts to the changes in funding. There are adjustments,” Buell said. “There’s, for instance, a different number of performers as part of the summer library program and you may see some changes in things like supplies or which programs that we offer. But we’re still doing everything we can to have a very robust calendar full of those.”

During the past several months, numerous patrons have described various fractures between TRL and Friends of the Library groups in the Grays Harbor region and beyond. In many cases, donations from friends groups are meant to fill in the gaps when it comes to programs and hired performers. Buell admitted that despite the generosity, there is a bit of a disconnect when it comes to these donations.

“I can speak very honestly that our friends groups are very generous with what they offer to us. It is frequently that sometimes we don’t know how to spend the money. This is particularly the case with a couple of our [friends groups] in west Grays Harbor,” Buell said. “We’re still figuring out how to take those funds in, put them to their proper uses, those sorts of things, so we’ve got some hiccups in that space.”

Remmers added, “I would say our friends groups in east Grays Harbor are very generous, and we already have some funds we didn’t even ask for this year.”

Gwin said she would like to see friends groups crop up and support the TRL Anywhere Library, which is a bookmobile that travels to various underserved locations.

“I got to ride twice with the Anywhere Library, most exciting experience in my life, because I wanted to really make sure in my mind that they were safe and they were functioning, and it was a phenomenal experience,” Gwin said.

An underlying theme of the meeting was the broken trust between TRL and its patrons, friends groups in particular.

“I think it’s events like these, making it to your meetings when we can, but also we recognize there are certain policies that have been created in recent years that some friends groups take issue with and we want those to be elevated for us,” Loup said. “I can’t promise that we’re going to do exactly what you want. But I can say that we will look at it in good faith, work with incoming leadership, and try to understand the problem at a deeper level, understand what that policy has done and determine whether or not it needs to be revised.”

Shay brought the discussion around to the TRL executive staff and its compensation. Executive salaries and raises while the organization operates in the red have also been controversial.

“Is the board looking to change the structure of the administration and downsize the administration in the service center?” Shay asked. “Are you waiting to hire an interim executive director to help you figure that out? I was thinking you could downsize.”

“The board doesn’t step into operational decisions directly in the sense of restructuring or hiring, firing anybody outside of the executive director, but we can give the executive director [direction]. I don’t know in the sense that it’s necessarily downsizing, but you can look at the way that it’s structured and look at how reporting flows and where critical departments are reporting,” Loup said. “I think there’s a need for, and just speaking for myself here, restructuring how administration is structured. There are already discussions just waiting for the interim director to come in for certain compensation adjustments that have happened in recent years to be rolled back to the previous levels. That’s already been kind of put up voluntarily so there are some steps currently underway to reduce some costs outside of just the branches and front lines. That’s probably about as much as I can say on that right now.”

Shay also spoke to the broken trust, especially when efforts were afoot to close the Hoquiam Timberland Library in 2018 and expressed a desire for TRL to repair relationships with municipalities and to help cover costs for maintaining the library buildings.

“Trust was broken in Hoquiam when it came out that TRL was going to close this branch after we worked our tails off at the city to get $1.5 million to renovate this facility,” Shay said. “And at the time, we begged Timberland to help contribute to the cost of renovations, because maintaining a library like this is very expensive for a small city. Through your budget process, will TRL ever look to create a program to help maintain facilities besides the ones that you own?”

To which Loup said, “That’s part of the reason for this [meeting] is to get back on the track of rebuilding that trust and look forward to hopefully when we have an interim or permanent director having them in these rooms with us.”

Later in the meeting, Hughes echoed Shay’s sentiment, “This terrible, terrible disconnect that occurred when there was the threat to close this landmark institution and the way the city and its citizens were treated and all that. It should have been apparent then that there was a disconnect, a management disconnect between the fiduciary responsibilities of management, its patrons and the people in the trenches, local librarians.”

Clemens then raised concerns with launching a levy lift campaign and what those funds would be used for if the voters across five counties approved such a measure. Loup said that if TRL doesn’t find a way to increase revenue, the difficult decisions that confronted the organization earlier this year will rear their collective head again next year.

“One reason to try to go for it this year is the relatively low costs of putting it on a ballot in a midterm election year as opposed to a special election especially across five counties,” Loup said. “If we don’t get a levy lid lift, the decisions, hard decisions that we’ve had to roll back come right back up to the top because the step increases and the COLAs [cost of living adjustments] and the CBAs [collective bargaining agreements] have drastically outpaced the increase in property revenues that we get without a levy lid lift.”

In response to a question from Hughes, Loup and Gwin said that Library Services Director Andrea Heisel and Operations Director Brenda Lane have been “minding the store” during the search for an interim executive director, while Board of Trustees President Brian Mittge has been signing checks and approving payroll.

The meeting eventually concluded with gratitude from the trustees and the patrons for their attendance and candor as TRL continues to navigate turbulent waters.