Selectmen would like problems to go to dept. heads first

The chairman of the Board of Selectmen, Brian Watterson, and Town Administrator Don McLelland are considering requiring residents to notify the selectboard a couple of day in advance of their meeting about any issue they wish the board to address.

“They just feel that it’s gotten out of control,” McLelland said, referring to the selectmen and their bi-weekly meetings. “People come in with any kind of compliant, something they want fixed or something else and it can’t get fixed right away anyway. So (the people) feel like they’re cut short and they can’t get any satisfaction anyway.”

“It wasn’t intended to shut people off,” Watterson said of the new policy, which the whole board has yet to discuss. “It’s to make things more efficient. I think historically, the board has allowed people to bring things up as they saw fit, and it ends up becoming something like this: Normally, something is brought up from the floor and the board doesn’t have the information it needs to even discuss it. It could be a road or a lighting problem or a behavioral problem. And what ends up happening is we discuss it for a few minutes then we ask the town administrator to talk to the department head and report back to use,” he said.

The notification process should encourage people to bring their problems to the department heads before they come to the selectmen, Watterson said.

“We don’t want them to start at top. We want folks to call Town Hall and ask for department head, explain what the problem is and let the department head at least answer a question, or fix what needs to be fixed,” he said. “Because there’s nothing we can do anyway until we gather the facts.

“I get calls all the time at my office and I always ask people, have you talked to Fire Chief Rick Siegel? Or have you talked to Bob Bennett (who is director of the Public Works Department)? That’s the place to start,” the chairman said.

Town Administrator McLelland, who is retiring this summer, said he’s favored the notification process for some time because he feels it will make the town operations more efficient.

In other news, the selectmen held a closed-door session Saturday morning to discuss how to go about the process of choosing a successor for McLelland. Two Town Hall employees have applied for the position, Watterson said, and the board will look at how to evaluate the candidates and whether to advertise to those outside the current staff.

“I don’t believe we have to go to the public if we find someone we like (in house),” he said.