A Letter Shared

Savethepioneermuseum.blogspot.com received the following letter from another concerned citizen. Please keep your letters headed to the commission's desk!

County Commissioners,

As you well know, there is a serious problem at the Pioneer Museum. The problem needs your decisive action and leadership now. This is not another "good ole boy" issue (it obviously cannot be resolved internally). It is serious and it needs fixing.

#1. Get the facts and fast. Send in your auditors, the County Treasurer, or a strong county official and look at the records, time sheets, and interview, under oath, all the present and past staff. Answer the allegations one by one and look for other improprieties. Then tell the citizens of the county what you found. This is not just a personnel issue you can hide behind closed doors. It is a management issue and deserves transparency.

#2. Suspend the county museums board. It is clear this board is not providing the oversight and direction it is required to exercise. The leadership appears to be weak and commissioner Thompson is not doing his job either as liaison. He needs to admit it and assign someone else to do the job.

#3. Once you have the facts I suspect they will be clear. They will either show the board has been doing a very thorough job in its roll and the director has been doing a great job. Or the facts will show that the board has been inept, weak, and not fulfilling its responsibilities and the director has mismanaged the museum, its artifacts and their care, the staff and very possible broken state and or federal laws. If so, the members of the board should be immediately fired and replaced with people who know something about running a museum, are strong leaders, not politically partisan and willing to take on the hard role of rebuilding the trust needed by the community in the museum. At the same time the Pioneer museum director should be fired and charges considered if, in fact, she told her staff members to falsify their time sheets, and or other laws were broken.

#4. Hire a well qualified professional director and pay that person a professionally competitive salary. It is not hard to do a wage survey for comparable positions in the museum field.

#5. The friction between the Museum of the American West and the Pioneer Museum needs to stop. From the communities point of view they are seen as two parts of the same thing.......a nice display of our history. If these museum folks can't work together, then bring the leadership of the two entities together and help them get the issues between them settled. If the Museum of the American West board is causing some of the problems then demand that they too make changes just as you are.

This seems to be an on going problem for your board and the citizens of Fremont county. It's time you show good management and get this thing solved in a business like manner, take decisive action, and show some real nonpartisan leadership that is in the best interest of the people(taxpayers).

Thank you,