Join Rural Lewis County Indivisibles in Centralia, WA for a Hybrid: Organizing Meeting & Solidarity Rally to Support THE PATRON COALITION FOR LOCAL LIBRARIES in this fight against the MISMANAGEMENT AND SELF-SERVING TRL ADMINISTRATION!
Our Organizing Meeting will focus on more library support, planning for MAY DAY STRONG, and upcoming Elections Action.
Directly after the meeting, we’ll sign-wave and gather e-petition signatures. Then we’ll go for lunch in town.
📢 Check out this excellent and detailed Substack article below…
Caught Read Handed: Community Exposes Timberland Regional Library Admin’s Incompetence
They gave themselves raises—then laid off 61 people
Mar 18
The basic story of how we got here is not unfamiliar to library systems across the state and country, but the actions, and inactions, of TRL’s board and leadership team are perhaps more egregious than most.
And the consequences of ignoring the fallout risk doing lasting damage to an institution valued by so many in the community.
61 People
In the last couple of weeks, TRL sent layoff notices to 44 employees. Another 17 had already left voluntarily, bringing the total to 61, roughly a quarter of the entire district’s workforce.
Every single one of them is a frontline worker. The librarians, assistants, and specialists you actually see when you walk through the door.
Just one day after notices were sent, the Olympia branch was forced to close due to staffing shortages while three more branches, Hoodsport, McCleary, and Amanda Park, are being converted to a staffless self-service model.
That’s a polished way of saying the building stays open but nobody is there to actually help you.
No layoffs or pay cuts were announced for administration.
This is the third consecutive year that TRL has operated in the red, even as top-level executives received substantial pay raises and the administrative arm continued adding six-figure positions.
If you’re not in Lewis County or one of the five counties that Timberland serves, you might be thinking this sounds like a local budget dispute.
It isn’t.
What’s happening at TRL is a case study in how rural public institutions get hollowed out, and it’s a pattern playing out in communities everywhere.
Don’t Leave Libraries On Read
Libraries are among the last truly public spaces we have. They’re free. They’re open to everyone. In rural areas like ours, they’re often the only place to get reliable internet, access a computer, apply for a job, attend a community program, or find a quiet place to read.
For kids in communities like mine, the library is sometimes the only enrichment available outside of school.
This is why the fact that they’ve been set up to slowly starve is so devastating.
In Washington state, an initiative passed 25 years ago arbitrarily caps how much any taxing district can increase its property tax levy each year at 1%. Timberland gets about 93% of its funding from property taxes, and when costs go up 4 to 5% annually, as they typically do, and revenue can only grow by 1%, the math eventually catches up.
Another 5% of their budget comes from timber revenue, which has been declining for decades, while additional funding through grants has been hammered by the Trump administration’s attacks on the Institute of Museum and Library Services, costing Washington’s state library system $3.9 million in funding.
So the squeeze is real, and TRL has been talking about it publicly since at least 2016. But that structural problem alone does not explain what happened here, because the people running this system made a series of choices that turned a slow squeeze into a full-blown crisis, and then asked frontline workers to pay for it.
Follow the Money Up
The salary numbers at the top of TRL’s org chart tell you everything you need to know about the administration’s priorities during this supposedly dire financial period.
Cheryl Heywood’s salary went from $155,000 in 2023 to $189,000 in 2024 to $206,788 in 2025.
The administrative coordinator position was retitled “executive administrator” and jumped from $89,554 in 2023 to $133,760 for 2026.
The HR administrator went from $98,828 to $142,963 over the same period.
TRL also created a brand new “employee experiences advisor” position in 2025 at $120,376, and added a “special projects coordinator” for 2026 at $105,847.
The three top administrative positions alone account for $446,395 this year.
Then, in November 2025, with the budget already headed off a cliff, several 15% raises for TRL admin were recommended and granted by Heywood and the Board of Trustees.
Thirty days later, TRL announced a $3.8 million shortfall.
The union that represents TRL workers, AFSCME Local 3758, has been blunt about what that timeline means. Their most generous reading of the situation is that the administration severely underestimated the scale of the shortfall in the numbers they presented to the board in December, but even that would amount to severe financial negligence.
The less generous reading is worse.
TRL built up $13.2 million in reserves before 2020, then spent more than it took in for three straight years. By the time the board approved those December raises, reserves had already fallen below the system’s own 30% fund balance threshold.
The administration says they couldn’t have known that until the fiscal year closed in January, but anyone paying attention could see the trend had been obvious for years.
Repeat Offender
This isn’t the first time Heywood has faced calls for her removal.
In 2020, TRL was engulfed in a similar controversy after the public learned about a proposal to close roughly a third of the library system’s branches. Reporting at the time showed that the closures were treated as a foregone conclusion internally, and that branch staff who tried to warn the public were silenced by administration.
The community was outraged and Lewis County Commissioner Edna Fund called for Heywood’s ouster. Former Mountain View Library manager Mary Prophit resigned in 2021 citing internal leadership issues and a culture where staff couldn’t speak up without fear of retaliation.
And then the board renewed Heywood’s contract after she apologized and agreed to forego a raise for one year.
Now, six years later, the same pattern is playing out on a much larger scale. The administration burned through $13 million in reserves, gave itself raises along the way, and is now asking frontline workers, and the public, to absorb the consequences.
Prophit recently wrote another letter to the board calling for a vote of no-confidence in Heywood and saying that both Heywood and Director of Operations Brenda Lane need to be replaced. She described board members as only seeing information filtered through the very people causing the problems, with branch staff too battered by toxic leadership to speak freely.
The community seems to agree. A grassroots effort led by former TRL employee Rachelle Martin and activist Kylie McQuarrie has formed the Patron Coalition for Local Libraries. They’re organizing weekly online meetings, protests, letter-writing campaigns, and petitions demanding accountability.
After the layoff notices went out Sunday, they launched an email campaign asking county commissioners of all five member counties to remove the current Board of Trustees entirely.
Martin told The Daily World that there’s such an intense lack of trust between the community, the trustees, and the administration that she struggles to find a path ahead.
She also raised concerns about a culture of retaliation at Timberland, and that staff members are often unable to advocate for themselves because of it.
The Fix They Won’t Even Try
The only real substantial fix for TRL’s structural funding problem is a levy lid lift, which would let the library reset its tax rate to something sustainable. That would require voter approval.
TRL’s last attempt was in 2019, and it failed, but only by about 5 percentage points.
Heywood has said that TRL doesn’t believe a levy lid lift would pass in the current economy and that the administration is unwilling to put one on the ballot.
That position is increasingly hard to defend considering just last year, Fort Vancouver Regional Libraries passed a levy lid lift with about 54% of the vote.
Whatcom County Library System passed theirs too, after going 16 years without asking voters. Both systems face the exact same math that TRL faces. Both made the case to their communities, and both won.
If our neighbors to the north and south can do it, what’s stopping TRL from even trying? How does manifesting a loss through public statements inspire confidence that there’s even a viable financial future under current leadership?
Imagine a political candidate who launched their campaign with, “I doubt you’ll vote for me, so why even try.” That candidate would lose.
At some point, refusing to go to the voters stops looking like fiscal caution and starts looking like a choice to manage decline rather than fight for the institution you’re supposed to be leading.
The petition group is asking for more than a slap on the wrist. They want Heywood, Brenda Lane, and Library Services Director Andrea Heisel removed. They want complete budget transparency, a halt to non-essential building projects, and a commitment to prioritizing frontline staff over administrative expansion.
Those seem like reasonable demands from a community that just watched a quarter of its library system’s workforce get laid off while administration kept its raises.
But if you’ve been paying attention to TRL’s history, you know the board has a pattern of absorbing public anger, making sympathetic noises, and then protecting the status quo.
In 2020, that’s exactly what happened, and then the underlying problems festered for another six years until they exploded into what we’re living through right now.
The question is whether the board does the same thing again, or whether enough people show up to make that impossible.
If you use a Timberland library, if your kids attend programs there, if you’ve ever relied on one of these branches for internet access or job applications or just a place to sit and read, this is a moment to speak up.
Join the one of the Zoom meetings or write a letter. The board has to count every piece of public comment it receives, and the more people who show up, the harder it becomes for them to look away. You don’t have to make a comment; just being there in solidarity is enough to show how many of us care, and are paying attention.
The structural problems facing TRL are real and they won’t be solved by firing one person. But leadership matters.
The choices made at the top of this organization over the last several years turned a difficult situation into a disaster, and the people who made those choices have felt few consequences.
Until the administration is held accountable and the board commits to actually fighting for sustainable funding instead of managing a slow bleed-out, TRL’s libraries will keep getting smaller, emptier, and further from the communities they’re supposed to serve.
Our libraries belong to us. Let’s show up and act like it.
Share this post with friends and family who care about saving our libraries!
Here’s a link to this Substack and tons of informative articles on local issues…
https://open.substack.com/pub/zaceckstein/p/caught-read-handed-community-exposes?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
*A core principle behind all Indivisible events is a commitment to nonviolent action. We expect all participants to seek to de-escalate any potential confrontation with those who disagree with our values.*