Check into the background of Corinne Hill, the incoming director of the Chattanooga Public Library, and one thing jumps right out at you: the lady can pinch pennies with the best of them.
It was Ms. Hill – who has been interim director of the Dallas Public Library in Texas since June 2010 – who was at the center of the maelstrom created when city officials there slashed its annual funding by more than $10 million.
As a result, if a book in the Dallas Public Library got left on a reading table, according to news accounts, it stayed there until an unpaid volunteer was available to return it to a shelf.
The central library had lost almost half of the employees who had been paid out of the city’s pocket before the recession hit in 2008, and about 25 percent of those in branch libraries also were let go.
Now, looking back, Ms. Hill describes herself as a “hands-on, fully engaged library director with the vision to take a library forward, even in difficult times.”
In her application to become Dallas’ permanent library director – a position she was being considered for at the same time Bicentennial officials were following up her application to come to Chattanooga – Ms. Hill included among her skills her ability to keep the library running despite massive cutbacks.
Her accomplishments, she wrote, included “manag(ing) an 11 percent operating budget reduction for FY 10-11 without reducing staff, maintaining hours at the branches, and increasing materials funding from what was spent the previous fiscal year. This was achieved helping staff reach consensus on service priorities, increasing efficiencies and eliminating redundancies in daily operation, and implementing technology to assist with processes and service delivery.”
Her efforts won approval in the Dallas community; she was one of three finalists finally named after city officials hired a search firm that spent months trying to decide who should head the public library there permanently.
But the Texas search was exceedingly slow. Despite Dallas City Manager Mary Suhm’s reported intention of choosing a library director by Thanksgiving, the city has yet to hire anybody.
No wonder then, several Dallas Observer readers commented today, that Ms. Hill is no longer willing to continue working at the Texas library.
“One of the risks you take when you procrastinate on filling a position is that good candidates will go elsewhere,” one noted succinctly.