The MPC board lumbers toward finding a new president, despite disagreements.

Rosalyn Green, president of the Monterey Peninsula College Board of Trustees, has got her eyes on the calendar. Per California Community College regulations, the board has six to eight months from now to find a new permanent superintendent/president. One problem: Green presides over board members who routinely bicker throughout meetings. A two-member ad hoc committee failed over the summer to reach any agreement on how to even begin a search.

Feeling the weight of a deadline, Green stepped in during a meeting on Oct. 13, asking the five-member board to dissolve the committee made up of Vice Chair Loren Steck and Trustee Debby Anthony and start over. “They were struggling to agree on things that needed to be agreed upon,” Green says of Steck and Anthony, declining to elaborate. “There was a little tugging about my decision,” Green adds.

“A little tugging” is an understatement. During the meeting, the board first disagreed over a vote to approve the agenda that included dissolving the committee and creating a new one. (The agenda was approved 3-2.) Complaints included one by Trustee Libby Downey over Green “unilaterally” setting the agenda – a normal part of a chair’s role – and Steck insisting they were taking an illegal vote. Steck also alluded to a closed-session discussion. “It was pretty heated at the end,” he said, underscoring the deep divisions that have been plaguing the board for almost two years.

Some of those divisions swirl around Anthony, who has displayed a habit of disrupting meeting discussions with objections and other interjections. She was the subject of an independent investigation launched earlier this year when an MPC employee filed a complaint alleging Anthony was harassing them. Not all of the allegations were substantiated. The board considered censuring Anthony in August, but instead voted to encourage all board members to follow board policies in interacting with employees.

Green re-nominated Anthony to the presidential search ad hoc committee, citing Anthony’s past experience, which includes nearly 40 years as a counselor at the college. Green also nominated Trustee Yuri Anderson, a past board president. Downey immediately complained Green was “trying to get rid of” Steck, the longest-serving member of the board.

The acrimonious meeting continued, leaving Green to interject that they needed to stop “throwing darts and arrows toward one another.” Steck tried to nominate Downey, but Green prevailed with a 3-2 vote to appoint Anderson and Anthony to the search committee, Steck and Downey against. Despite more back and forth, the trustees managed to also approve the hiring of search consultants Community College Search Services, and the make-up of a larger search committee that includes faculty, students and community members.

Green says with a deadline looming they are now back on track.

The college’s interim leader, Mark Zacovic, took over the position on Jan. 18, after the former president, David Martin, left on Nov. 1, 2021.