This is a story of self-interest masquerading as public interest. It is the story of a lawsuit against an unlikely target for an unlikely reason. The lawsuit had its genesis in a library committee making a power grab.

In the year 2017, Weihua Yan ran for a seat on the Great Neck Library board of trustees. The incumbent, Marietta DiCamillo, declined to face the possibility of losing and bowed out. From that moment, the library had internecine warfare in its future.

Like other institutions, the library has a governing board that has committees. One library committee codified in the bylaws is the Nominating Committee. Hidden from sight and small in size, its five members have wielded in-house control of the composition of the board and the committee.

Each year for a few months the Nominating Committee interviews residents and selects those to place on the ballot to become trustees and to replace members of the committee itself.

Library watchers have long been aware that the Nominating Committee’s endorsement gives its candidates an unfair advantage over independent candidates. In 2021 the trustees, therefore, placed on the ballot a proposition to eliminate the Nominating Committee by removing it from the bylaws. The proposition garnered about 60%  of the vote but it needed two-thirds. The measure failed.

In 2020, the committee provided no nominees for the two positions on the Nominating Committee. There were no candidates on the official ballot, but two people were elected to the committee, Marietta DiCamillo and her sister Marianna Wohlgemuth. They each received four write-in votes.

The Nominating Committee’s other task arises when a seat on the board becomes empty between elections. To fill the vacancy, the committee must offer the board “two or more names” to choose from.

In 2021, the sisters’ first year together on the Nominating Committee, it offered David Zielenziger to fill a vacancy. This was problematic because back in 2018 David Z. had been the committee’s nominee for trustee and he lost by hundreds of votes.

When the committee offered David Z. the second time, it would be an appointment that bypassed the voters. The trustees refused to appoint someone the voters had declined to elect, and they asked the committee to supply an additional name. The committee stonewalled. The board, responsive to state law, quickly assembled its own search and filled the vacancy.

In retrospect, it should be noted that DiCamillo was on the Nominating Committee both times it selected David Z. Thereafter David Z. joined DiCamillo’s lawsuit against the library trustees who had refused to anoint him a trustee. Don Panetta served on the Nominating Committee with DiCamillo when it selected David Z. the first time, and Panetta also joined the lawsuit. Panetta was elected a library trustee starting January 2022 and he is an active player in the court record of the lawsuit.

The trustees for their part have behaved much as the staff of a library does, slow to combat and averse to battle. Nonetheless, the circumstances are unambiguous and straightforward: The board is the governing body. A committee is answerable to the board. Both are answerable to the library’s bylaws. The board and the bylaws are subject to New York State law.

The people who brought the lawsuit intended it to prevent the board from filling a trustee vacancy on its own. Yet filling the vacancy is in the best interests of the library. Here’s why.

The seven-member board has to protect its ability to conduct its business. For this, it needs its quorum, which is five. This gives a margin for two trustees to work late at their jobs or to care for a sick family member or to have a flat tire. Two absences and the board can still convene to approve spending and the hiring of staff. Fewer trustees translates to a probability that meetings will be canceled.

When the vacancy occurred in September 2021, the trustees had two imperatives: to fill that vacancy and in doing so to respect the community’s 2018 vote. The trustees did both. By contrast, two members of the Nominating Committee decided to make it a turf war in court.

When the lawsuit came, it did not represent the community. (Four votes put the two litigants on the Nominating Committee in our community of about 42,000.)

The lawsuit raised this question: Why sue a library? The short answer is this: It’s personal.

The lawsuit was nurtured on social media to erode our community’s faith in our library’s current trustees and our librarians. The suit gave rise to demands that our library ban books, that we limit free speech in a place that exemplifies free speech.

A county in north Texas recently banned “The Diary of Anne Frank,” which should give pause to the Jews in Great Neck who are visibly promoting book banning. Burn books, confiscate art, gag speech—it has a name: fascism.

I’ve read what I call a foot-high stack of court documents generated since the start of the court case against the library ten months ago. The documents reveal the extent to which it is most definitely personal, starting with library Trustee Barry Smith’s joining the sisters’ suit against his fellow trustees. Smith wanted to be board president but they all voted for Mimi Hu instead.

The court record shows an email among library trustees specified confidential that Smith sent to Jessica Hughes, who opposes Mimi Hu in the upcoming library election.  

One court document calls for Smith’s termination and lists 38 occasions on which Smith leaked confidential information in violation of state law and otherwise subverted the board and the library. Smith’s termination seems overdue.

Smith’s first violations occurred about three months after he took office. He pressured the head of the Children’s Room to schedule his wife to present a children’s program. His tool of persuasion was to insist that as African Americans he and the department head should stick together. Smith was using his position for personal benefit.

Recently and belatedly, Smith has decided to fight being terminated by alleging he is the victim of racism. He casts himself as standing alone against a racially hostile community, a community that, by the way, elected him twice. He tells the court he is the first African American on the library board. He is not. He says African Americans comprise 1 percent of the library population. Incorrect. It is 4.3 percent, which is about 1,800 people.

There is so much more to this saga that has destabilized our library, more down-and-dirty details, but for now I suggest you vote in the library election on Oct. 31 for good and all.

Rebecca Rosenblatt Gilliar

Great Neck