Alicia M. Laible, former City Council candidate, is a 28-year-old, self-described "nerd" who wants to be on the library board.
Is that too much to ask?
Perhaps so, based on the lack of support by council members prior to last week's City Council meeting, during which Laible's request from the mayor for an appointment to the library board was suddenly proffered and then just as suddenly withdrawn.
"(Mayor Paul) Dyster pulled it off the agenda. He knew he didn't have any support for it," Council Chairman Sam Fruscione said.
Never far below the surface, a political reality arises.
Laible, with Dyster's strong support, ran in a heated campaign last fall to unseat one of either of two of the three council members who are now set to vote against her appointment to the library board.
Dyster ran what some might call a vicious campaign, which saw, among other things, the longtime and popular council member (and top vote-getter in the city) Robert Anderson fail to get his own Democratic Party endorsement by a city party apparently controlled by Dyster.
The main reason: As a council member Anderson does not always support Dyster's spending plans.
Virtually unknown newcomer Laible got the party endorsement instead of Anderson , and the Republicans endorsed Anderson and Glenn Choolokian. who both went on to win.
Even after stiffing Anderson in the Democratic Party endorsement process and trying to get him defeated in the primary, Dyster paid for a last-minute campaign flier featuring a photo of Laible (his candidate) with Anderson, in order to tie Laible in with the supremely popular Anderson, in spite of the fact that Anderson was campaigning with Laible's opponent Choolokian.
In short, it was a tough race.
That said, Laible lost fair and square. She campaigned honestly and vigorously.
Now she wants to emerge again in a lesser role, a simple seat on the library board, an unpaid position with little glamour and no political clout.
Peculiarly, both the council, which is determined at this point not to endorse her, and Laible herself bring up issues that are tied to race and gender, and not, one suspects, to the real reason -- simple politics. The majority on the council, one strongly suspects, don't want to support the woman who tried to defeat them and is aligned closely with the mayor.
But that's not what they are saying.
No, instead they say they don't want her because she is a white woman.
Fruscione, Anderson and Choolokian say they want a minority appointed to the position.
"We want the library board to closely resemble the City Council. The City Council has two African Americans," Fruscione said. "We'd like to see a Native American or an Asian on the library board."
Laible did not entirely take the bait.
"Minority. That's a very broad term," Laible said. "To just kind of come out and say, I want a minority, what does that mean? Do you mean a gender minority? Do you mean an ethnic minority? Do you mean a racial minority? A sexual-orientation minority? What do you want? I think that when you say something so broad, and so elusive almost, it makes me think you don't really care who's on this board.
"Right now on the boards you have 76 percent represented by men -- 76 percent of all the boards together are men. So for them come out and say we want more minority representation, well, a woman in this instance, is kind of very important to add there.
"In my opinion, that's a kind of a political ploy, if you're going to use something like that. They say there's no minority representation, well, you do have an African American on the board already (Carrie Mitchell)."
Now, in fairness to Fruscione and the other men and women who make appointments to the various boards in this city, it may well be that 76 percent of people on various unpaid volunteer boards are white men, and that, one suspects, is because most likely 76 percent of the people who volunteer for these unpaid, thankless, civic board positions are white men.
It is not like there are multiple people vying for these unpaid jobs. Usually the council is lucky to get even one person willing to work at any of these volunteer positions.
"And that's another thing," Laible said, explaining her motives. "There's no one else coming out and saying they want to be on this board. No one else is running for this board, so they're literally just voting against me. It's not like anyone else has stepped forward. No one else is doing this. I'm coming out and saying I want to give them my time, I want to volunteer. I want just to help the community. How you can turn that into a negative is beyond me."
Meantime, since the controversy erupted, and it seemed likely Laible would not get the appointment, Ken Hamilton -- popular African-American raconteur, columnist for the Niagara Gazette, civil rights activist and, as Internet radio host Sal Paonessa calls him, the city's leading "EOE" (Expert On Everything) -- has said he would like to be considered for an appointment to the library board.
Was Laible denied a sincere desire to serve in a city that sees too few young people with any motive to get involved in civic life?
She thinks so.
Blaming "self-serving politicians," Laible last week launched a Facebook campaign to garner support for her appointment to the library board, posting the phone numbers and e-mail addresses of the five City Council members and encouraging her 1,133 Facebook friends to contact them to "let them know we are sick of this nonsense."
"That got really big," Laible said. "I was surprised how much attention it got. It was fantastic actually, the people who came out and supported me and the personal messages I got. People I've never met, people on both sides of it too -- that's the good thing -- people who are, if you want to say, in the Sam Fruscione camp and people who are in this Dyster camp. I had people from both sides."
Council member Choolokian, who defeated Laible for his seat on the council by about 250 votes, in the narrowest election of the season, sees Dyster behind her recommendation, and not for the sake of the library but for political reasons.
It's not about library science, in other words.
"They want to make everything politics," Choolokian said. "When we found out about her name being submitted, we did our research. We wanted a couple of minorities on the board. Dyster said that nobody else was interested."
Apparently, at the time, nobody else was interested, so the council majority determined to look for someone who was interested and was a minority, they said, and -- perhaps left unsaid -- someone who had not run against them and is unlikely to run against them in the future.
Why advance the political career of a potential political opponent?
Dyster certainly never would.
Try to get even an appointment with Dyster or a return phone call, if you are not a friend, a supporter or campaign contributor.
Still, Laible is not shy about giving her side of the argument.
"I don't want to keep with these silly feuds and arguments and just doing things like this. Denying someone's placement on a library board, you know, it's a little silly. It's things like that that are holding this city back. Come on, guys, get over it."
Anderson views it from a different vantage point.
Dyster did not talk to the council members first, and let them know that he was recommending a woman he had just utilized to try to take their jobs -- even going to the extent of denying Anderson what any rational person would have thought he had earned, as an incumbent, the endorsement of his party.
Instead, Dyster made it a last-minute Monday surprise. "The mayor pulled the damn thing at the last minute," Anderson said. "You don't need a master's degree to be on the library board here in Hooterville. We should have African Americans. We should have Italians. We should have people who have Jewish background, Native Americans. There should be diversity at the library. Period. OK? And anything else we have in this city, there should be diversity."
So you wouldn't vote for her?
"Me? No. It's the wrong thing to do. And why her? Out of the clear blue sky? Nobody ever heard of Alicia Laible in this city until the mayor and a few of his cohorts decided they wanted her for my position (as city councilman). OK? Who's going to be next? Francine Del Monte for an appointment? It's all bullcrap, that's all."
So is there any chance of Laible and the majority on the council working together?
Laible thinks there may be hope.
"I don't want to turn this thing into a political thing, because to me it's not a political thing," Laible said.
"That's what's going to hurt the library. You have these feuds that are going on between people, and if you try to move that into other areas of the community, that's who's hurt, is the community. Here's the thing: I would love it if we could be a unified party. If we could all work together move forward. And that really is all I want to do.
"I didn't want to be a politician. I wanted to be a community leader. I'm human. I make mistakes. And I want to do something good for my community. That's it."
IN LAIBLE'S OWN WORDS
In a broad-ranging interview with Alicia Laible, she said frequently that it was not politics that motivated her to seek an appointment to the library board, but rather an interest in libraries and their future. Here are some excerpts from that interview:
"I'm very interested in social media and technology and outreach, and I know that libraries right now are at this kind of crossroads where it's important for them to still stay relevant, and it's kind of deciding how to do that and to kind of get back to the heart of the library -- which is education and community.
"How do we use these new technologies to best serve the library? I sat down with (Executive Director) Michelle Petrazzoulo, and she and I are 100 percent on the same page. I've gone through and met some of the staff at the library, and I've toured and I see what they're doing, how they're already using technology to create archives of historic artifacts and that from Niagara Falls. And it's just something I'm really interested in and wanted to be a part of it.
"I'm much more interested, at this point in my life, in getting involved in something macro-level: policy-making, trying to make a change on a bigger level. So after the (2011) campaign ended, I tried to think how, moving forward, I could best utilize my skill set for Niagara Falls. And I do have a background in strategic planning, at the Family Justice Center and other things. I'm certified to teach English. My bachelor's degree is in political science and I have my master's of social work.
"Specifically, I went into the mental health field, which I also think helps, because I try to be a very rational and kind of levelheaded person when I approach problems and solutions. Again, I was hoping that that was something I could bring to the table. And also I interned in a library.
"I don't want to do anything that's going to hurt the library with negative publicity. I don't want to do anything that's going to be counterproductive, but I'm hoping that we can all kind of reach some kind of agreement, and they'll see this is a good fit, this is an honest good fit. And again, I want to stay involved and I want to keep active, and this is something I'd like to do, and I think I'd be an asset.
"I think that one of the things in Niagara Falls that we need to work on with our political parties is that you're not always going to like each other, but you have to be able to work together."
E-mail Ron Churchill at ronchurchill@yahoo.com.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | Feb. 14 2012 |