October 25, 2008 Select Board Meeting
Select Board Meeting -- October 25, 2008
Town Room,
Meeting called to order by Mr. Weiss at 8:12 a.m.
Present: Gerry
Weiss, Diana Stein, Alisa Brewer, Stephanie O'Keeffe
Absent: (none)
Present: Town Manger Larry Shaffer; Assistant Town Manager/Finance Director
John Musante
Town Staff: Chief Keith Hoyle, Chief Charles Scherpa, Guilford Mooring, David
Burgess, Claire McGinnis, Sonia Aldrich, Kay Zlogar, Eunice Torres, Sandra
Burgess, Ron Bohonowicz, Kris Pacunas, David Ziomek, Jonathan Tucker, Bonnie
Weeks, Epi Bodhi, Kathy Pollard. Also
present were Linda Chalfant, Barbara Bilz, Nancy Pagano, Maura Plante and Roy
Rosenblatt, whose presentations were postponed to a later date.
Mr. Weiss stated that the purpose of the meeting was for the Select Board to hear about the budget and resource issues of the Town Departments, and to ask questions. He said that no questions would be taken from members of the public.
Departmental Budget Presentations
The Select Board heard budget presentations from the following departments. Prior to the meeting, Select Board members received documents (links at end of this post) from each Department Head providing answers to a common set of questions.
Fire/EMS
Police
Public Works
Finance
Human Resources/Human Rights
Town Clerk
Facilities Maintenance
Information Technology
Conservation
Planning
Inspection Services
Public Health
Veterans Benefits
Select Board members asked questions, but took no votes.
No action taken.
VOTED unanimously to adjourn the open meeting at 1:27 p.m.
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• This feels like kind of a cop-out, but it’s the best I can do. I know that I can’t fully-participate in meetings when I’m also taking notes for the minutes. (Some are probably thinking—“What do you mean? You never shut up!” While I surely do participate, I am not able to be thinking as carefully and critically as I can if half my brain isn’t devoted to the note taking.) So I made the decision ahead of time that I would not take notes for this meeting. Particularly because the info in the pre-meeting departmental reports was so comprehensive – duplicating that by summarizing it didn’t seem worthwhile. Plus, we had another full meeting Monday night, making it essentially impossible to do real minutes for both. Since this one was an unusual meeting, it gets the unusual minutes.
• I think I’ve already summarized my thoughts on this meeting pretty well here. And although that post has the departmental report document links, I’ll add them here too so that they are directly accessible from this summary. Read them. They’re incredibly informative:
