Looking Forward to Special Town Meeting
Jun 14, 2010 –
To New Gloucester Voters,
I wasn't kidding when I told the Budget Committee at their last hearing that I have been listening hard, and have been known to change my mind. I'm not as certain as some that New Gloucester's future will be endlessly bleaker than any of us are imagining, but I am becoming convinced that conservative spending is appropriate now.
Short of maintaining the full-time assessor's position we have had for several years, of all the other options offered I like Chong Ae Berry's idea the best - changing the position to 4 days a week, which lowers both salary and benefits, while giving the town a team player who would most likely be ready to go to full-time at such time as the work picks up and it becomes good economics for the town. This gets the work done and preserves the personal service and small-town dynamics that townspeople have made it clear they value.
There are several things I don't like about the idea of contracting out to O'Donnell's, but what bothers me the most is that we didn't get all the information when the quote of around $30,000 was cited. Several towns similar to New Gloucester which use O'Donnell's, as the selectmen have been suggesting, ALSO have had to pay an additional part-timer to actually get all the work done, so the final amount budgeted for assessing runs a lot more than $30,000 - even over $80,000 in one case. This was never mentioned, and that seems to me very manipulative.
Recently our town manager tried to explain away this issue by saying that the part-time funding lines in these towns are not for employees hired to do this work only, but a way of accounting for a portion of the salary of a town employee spending other hours doing other town work. That doesn't solve our problem. I don't believe any of our town staff has the equivalent of one day per week of extra time on their hands to handle what the contracted service cannot.
Either someone is going to get slammed with too much work, or work isn't going to get done, or we will end up hiring someone to patch in.
This is the same "fuzzy math" that apparently is still in place with regard to fire barn maintenance - it's not budgeted, but "it will get done;" and more problematically, with the legal issues the town will be addressing, including but not limited to the polluted wells along Cobb's Bridge road, for which the owners have had no town response for an entire year.
More than the assessor's position, the vote at town meeting in May was about not getting all the information - whether because they don't know, or they aren't letting us know, it's a big problem. The Board chastises us for not being engaged enough, and at the same time tells us not to worry about the actual details, just trust them that things will work out. We need the facts - and we need to pay attention.
Mr. Libby and Mr. Field both promised that they would provide voters at the Special Town Meeting with a one-page updated report on the status of all town accounts. If they actually do this, and present it in a way that is understandable AND adds up, all this drama since town meeting will have definitely been worth it. My big hope for town meeting is that everyone gets to discuss everything completely. My big hope for all that comes after is that the Board of Selectmen will take their obligation to provide the public clear,COMPLETE and timely information as seriously as they do their duty to guard the public coffers.
See you at town meeting!
Penny Hilton
New Gloucester
