The family of late businessman Michael J. Maloof has withdrawn an offer to donate $1 million to the City of Santa Fe, New Mexico, to support its new Southside branch library, after controversy erupted over a plan to name the branch after Maloof.
“The naming opportunity was presented to us by the co-president of the Friends of the Santa Fe Public Library and the library director,” the Maloof family said in a statement announcing the withdrawal June 15. “The subsequent controversy has been hurtful and disappointing.”
In addition to branch naming rights, the board of the Friends of the Santa Fe Public Library originally proposed naming rooms within the branch for other donors, according to the June 15 Santa Fe New Mexican. Director of Libraries Patricia Hodapp told American Libraries that the Friends followed the city’s naming policy, which requires soliciting nominees from the public, permits buildings to be named only for deceased individuals, and allows the board to consider nominees’ character and donations of time or money. The library board chose Maloof from eight nominees.
City Council member Miguel Chavez formally proposed Maloof’s name at a council committee meeting in May. Grace Brill, a member of the Friends board, acknowledged in the June 11 New Mexican that some residents and city council members felt there was “a taint where money is involved.”
In an attempt to dampen criticism of the deal, a city council committee proposed also naming the main library after historian and local activist Pedro Ribera Ortega, the New Mexican reported June 11. That move only created more controversy, because the main library building was already named for municipal judge Joseph A. Berardinelli Sr. in 1975, when it was functioning as the city hall, although Hodapp said the library did not adopt the name when it moved into the building in 1986.
Library Board President Michele Huff noted in a June 20 letter to the New Mexican that trustees “chose to accept the Mike J. Maloof nomination and its promised donation after intense scrutiny of Mr. Maloof’s qualifications and high level of civic responsibility.” She continued: “But the process was too rancorous: A City Council that could not bring itself to approve the name and donation on its own merits in a timely manner, combined with a media climate that preferred to highlight imagined controversy rather than to focus on solutions.”
“This man was one of those quiet donors who supported probably everyone in the community without expecting a thing,” Hodapp told AL. She added that the donation would have gone into the branch’s endowment fund and generated about $50,000 per year for the library.
Posted June 21, 2007.