LITTLE ROCK — H.L. McGill, the director of the Mosaic Templars Cultural Center, has been fired again, just over a year after he was fired and then later rehired on the recommendation of Gov. Mike Beebe’s administration.
As of Monday, McGill “is no longer director,” Melissa Whitfield, spokesman for the Department of Arkansas Heritage, said Wednesday.
McGill was fired by Martha Miller, the department’s deputy director for museums, Whitfield said. “When Martha Miller started last fall, [McGill] knew he would be reevaluated,” Whitfield said. “She decided not to keep him on as director.”
Whitfield declined to elaborate on the reasons for McGill’s dismissal, saying it was a personnel matter.
McGill was fired March 18, 2011, for “unsatisfactory job performance on many levels,” according to a letter that Trey Berry, Miller’s predecessor, wrote to the department’s personnel manager. McGill had been hired the previous December. He drew an annual salary of $51,795.33.
But members of Beebe’s staff, after appeals for the governor to intervene from museum supporters and the legislative black caucus, concluded McGill’s dismissal may have been too hasty and recommended he be reinstated. McGill resumed his duties last June.
Berry is now the dean of the College of Liberal and Performing Arts and a history professor at Southern Arkansas University in Magnolia. He didn’t return a message left on his university voice mail Wednesday afternoon. State Rep. Tracy Steele, DNorth Little Rock and caucus chairman who spoke up for McGill last year, didn’t return a telephone call to his office.
Beebe’s staff, meanwhile, had been “informed before his termination, or his dismissal,” said Matt DeCample, the governor’s spokesman. “We did not weigh in one way or another. We said it was their decision and whatever decision they made we would support.”
The circumstances had changed since last year in that McGill had had enough time on the job to be evaluated, DeCample said. “The issue that was there last year was not there this time.”
Berry cited McGill’s failure to submit a grant for the center and poor communications as two reasons for McGill’s first dismissal, according to McGill’s personnel file. His most recent personnel file won’t be available until today at the earliest, Whitfield said.
According to the original file, two days after McGill began as center director Dec. 12, 2010, Berry said he told Mc-Gill to complete an application for an Institute Museum and Library Services grant before a mid-January deadline. The grant would allow the museum to create new exhibits and hire new staff.
Because it had missed the previous year deadline, about 75 percent of the application had been completed before McGill’s arrival, according to Berry’s notes. But McGill failed to turn in the application on time because of “computer glitches,” and the museum missed out on the grant again.
“This was his No. 1 goal, and I stressed that in at least three meetings,” Berry wrote last year. “What I have been told by him is that he did not begin to enter the application until the late afternoon and evening of the day — the deadline date. It says very explicitly in the application to begin attempting to enter it into the computer days before in case there were computer problems.”
Berry placed McGill on a two-year disciplinary notification a short time later.
Berry’s notes also said McGill’s other infractions included leaving before other employees on several snow days in February 2011, scheduling museum events without informing the staff and missing a speech for a Chamber of Commerce group.
For his part, McGill said at the time that Berry misrepresented him. A telephone number for McGill couldn’t be located Wednesday.
The Mosaic Templars Cultural Center, a museum of Arkansas black history, is part of the Department of Arkansas Heritage. The center is at 501 W. Ninth St., the site of the headquarters of the Mosaic Templars, a black fraternal organization that by the 1920s had one of the largest concentrations of black-owned and controlled capital in the nation.
Arkansas, Pages 7 on 03/29/2012