Imhoff Responds to Inflammatory Lexington Library Audit Report

Embattled former Lexington (Ky.) Public Library director Kathleen Imhoff is scheduled to appear at a board meeting today and present a detailed response to a report from city auditors that accuses her of, among other things, conflict of interest in her consulting work and using her library laptop to view "adult materials" on the internet. The results of the audit of the public library were published in detail by the Lexington Herald-Leader with a headline reading "Audit finds adult materials on library CEO's computers." The newspaper also reported that "more than 14,000 files were deleted from Imhoff's computers after she was notified not to alter or remove any documents" but that "the library challenged the finding about deletions in part, saying many files were removed by an automatic process used to clean out the files." Imhoff told American Libraries that she also expected the board "to decide if they will mediate with me, even though they already told me they would after the city audit was published." She has maintained since her abrupt termination in July that she might have to resort to a lawsuit if the library refused to mediate. WKYT televsion news reported that Imhoff "is accused of spending thousands of dollars on pizzas, beer and wine, and even having adult content on a work computer." Along with her attorney, she addressed the accusations against her in a December 4 interview, saying all the expenditures are justified and that it's a mystery to her how the so-called adult images got on her computer. "I did not use any computer, either my work computer or my laptop, in any way that has been alluded to," Imhoff said. "We work very hard to make the library fiscally accountable," she said, "and yet that is certainly not how this audit report appears to portray this." Imhoff said her detailed response to the audit would be posted on her WatchCatKathleen blog (where she has already posted a preliminary response) following today's meeting, and her attorney would be sending it to the city as well. She said they would also be demanding a retraction for inaccuracies published by the Herald-Leader. "If the auditors had just gone the second step and either asked the staff or looked at the record, they never would have made the accusations they did," Imhoff told AL. "They should ask the questions, I don’t have a problem with that, but if they had checked the records they would have seen that the alleged conflict of interest in consulting work for SOLINET was when I worked for Broward County. They would have seen that I spoke at the Louisiana Library Association on my vacation time. Instead, they just said it was a conflict of interest. It’s disappointing that in nine months they could not have found the time to verify or get more information about the things they put in their report." Imhoff has expressed outrage over the way her personnel files were obtained by the newspaper and made public. "For 40 years I’ve worked in libraries and have never worked in a place where the personnel records were public like this," she said. "I'm trying to learn from this experience and help others avoid it in the future," she said of starting a blog. "If something positive can come from that I think it’s a really good thing."